But from a physical point of view, they're very complicated, much more so than the piano or violin. The new insights are nonetheless plentiful enough to help music professionals make better reproductions of old wind instruments, such as Baroque recorders, and to invent new ones, scientists say. The advances also are aiding electronic music, including that of synthesizers, organs, home computers, games and movies. The goal is to make artificial tones more realistic and, in other cases, to create sounds and instruments that have no counterpart in the real world. For instance, scientists can now make a virtual flute of almost any size and shape, its tube curled or a hundred feet long.
Notes can be very low and sometimes very strange.
Electronics giants such as Yamaha, the Japanese maker of musical instruments, are incorporating some of the advances into products. The research is global, with work being done in Japan, Europe and Canada as well as the United States. Scientists agree that the physics of flutes and similar wind instruments is a challenging final frontier, despite the field's long history and recent strides. Aristotle had a theory. So did lots of acoustics guys.