Many kids take a toot on a recorder in school music class. Now Hiroshi Yokoyama from the Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan and his colleagues are revealing how the popular wind instrument shapes sound.
The team spent two weeks modelling the acoustics using a supercomputer, and then verified their simulations by measuring sound levels using microphones, and the velocity of air particles around a real recorder. The visualisation they generated is shown in the video above.
The first clip shows sound levels inside the instrument's pipe, which are affected by the opening below the mouthpiece, called the window. The second clip zooms in to combine the sound levels and the turbulent air flow at the window. The final sequence shows the resulting sound levels around the instrument.
"We hope the results will be useful for the design of musical instruments," says Yokoyama.
The world of musical instruments is expanding with novel designs like the electromagnetic piano
Yokoyama's team presented the work at an annual congress on noise control engineering in Melbourne, Australia.
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