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Title: Acoustical Aspects of Woodwind Instruments by Cornelis Johannes Nederveen ISBN: 0-87580-577-9 Publisher: Northern Illinois Univ Pr Pub. Date: July, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)
Rating: 4
Summary: Tantalizing acoustic secrets revealed.... partially.
Comment: First off, this is a physicist's book. It is worth bearing in mind that this book is a PhD thesis, and has that format: there are lots of equations, with a few charts on almost every page. That will probably put a lot of people off. Still, if you really want to understand, in a quantitative way, the acoustics of woodwinds, I haven't found another book that approaches it as directly as this one (Fletcher and Rossing's book is encyclopedic in its coverage of instruments, and therefore necessarily thin on specifics of particular instruments). You probably don't need a PhD to read it, but certainly a master's degree to get much out of it.
First, the bad news: I think the layout could be improved: the sections are numbered in order from the start of the book right through to the end, rather than in a chapter-by-chapter way. This makes it difficult to find section 27 (for example), because there's no way to narrow down where it might be. The notes added for this edition could have been integrated into the main text, rather than being appended. Still, I suppose the readership may not be large enough to warrant such a thorough overhauling.
The good news: This book lays it all out for you, if in a rather terse way. It's broken down into four chapters, roughly corresponding to introduction, bore, toneholes, applications. The math is heavy at times, and is not helped by the choice to print in two columns on each page, thereby causing a lot of equations to be broken over two lines. Also the choice of variable names is not particularly mnemonic, so I found myself constantly referring back a few pages, to remind myself of their meaning. Still, it starts off generically, develops general models, then applies them to each of the classical instruments: flute, sax, clarinet, oboe, bassoon.
My greatest wish for future editions of the book would be to augment how much is left unsaid. Each chapter concludes with a half-page summary. More than once, I found myself reading something in the summary that I couldn't recall from the text. But by studying the charts and equations closely, and doing a few back-of-the-envelope calculations, I found that it really was there. (An example would be at the end of Ch.2, where there's a mention of how conical-bore instruments can be overblown in the octave until the truncation ratio reaches about 0.2. It's not explicitly stated in the main text, but you can see it, with a little thought, from the charts on the facing page.) So I feel that the book could really be enhanced with some more textual analysis.
I hope the author has a chance to re-work this book - there's clearly so much between the lines.
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Title: The Amateur Wind Instrument Maker by Trevor Robinson ISBN: 0870233122 Publisher: Univ. of Massachusetts Press Pub. Date: March, 1981 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics : Second, Revised Edition by Arthur H. Benade ISBN: 048626484X Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 November, 1990 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Physics of Musical Instruments by Neville H. Fletcher, Thomas D. Rossing ISBN: 0387983740 Publisher: Springer Verlag Pub. Date: August, 1998 List Price(USD): $77.95 |
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Title: Musical Instrument Design: Practical Information for Instrument Making by Bart Hopkin ISBN: 1884365086 Publisher: See Sharp Press Pub. Date: September, 1996 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Simple Flutes: A Guide to Flute Making and Playing, or How to Make and Play a Flute of Bamboo, Wood, Clay, Metal, PVC Plastic, or Anything Else by Mark Shepard ISBN: 0938497189 Publisher: Shepard Publications Pub. Date: January, 2001 List Price(USD): $8.00 |
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