In the last installment of the Flute Forum, I began to examine the various ways to determine the overall quality of a flute, and whether a flute is a good match for you. The characteristics discussed were the physical dimensions of the flute and the response of the flute to your air. At the end of the previous column, I stated that tone would be one of the subjects intended for this issue . Upon deeper exploration, it became clear that the topic of tone is not only very important, but is a vast area that could generate a textbook of information. Acoustics of the Flute will be the topic of this Flute Forum, and the Psycho-biology of Tone will appear in the next issue.
Tone is the heart and soul of our instrument.
It is possibly the characteristic that attracts most flute players, but is also the least understood. Because of this lack of knowledge about tone, flute selection based on tonal issues becomes very difficult. It isn t the purpose of the Forum to become a physics textbook, but if we are to inform, some of the information may be technical in nature. For those who are not interested in the technical information, scan down to the Summary paragraph. So, let s get started with the fundamental information about the creation of sound in our flutes.