Preface
When a musician is presented with an unfamiliar instrument, the natural reaction is
to investigate its properties and musical possibilities. If the instrument in question
is a member of the brass family, the player can attempt to sound it by buzzing
the lips against the mouthpiece, searching out the most easily playable notes and
investigating its timbral and expressive possibilities. Experimenting systematically
in this way is quite close to the approach that would be adopted by a scientist asked
to investigate the properties of the instrument. Initial experiments could be carried
out by subjecting the instrument itself to laboratory tests of various types, but to
arrive at a complete understanding of its purpose and possibilities, it is necessary to
study the way in which the player interacts with the instrument.
Our understanding of how brass instruments work has developed greatly over
the last few decades. Valuable coverage of brass instruments is available in several
textbooks on musical instrument acoustics, including Fundamentals of Musical
Acoustics (Benade 1976), The Musician’s Guide to Acoustics (Campbell and
Greated 1987), The Physics of Musical Instruments (Fletcher and Rossing 1998)
and Acoustics of Musical Instruments (Chaigne and Kergomard 2016), but to our
knowledge this is the first monograph dealing exclusively with instruments sounded
by lip vibration. It includes the reviews of scientific research into many aspects of
the behaviour of brass instruments undertaken in a number of centres worldwide and
reported on a lively conference circuit and in peer-reviewed journal articles. Areas
in which important advances have been made include the action of the player’s lips,
the effects of nonlinear sound propagation in instrument tubing, the radiation of
sound from brasswind bells, instrument taxonomy and computer modelling as an
aid to manufacturing and a tool for musical synthesis.
This book is intended to be intelligible and useful to the large number of brass
instrumentalists who take a scientific interest in their instruments and how they
are played. It is also intended to serve as an academic and research text, and
more advanced treatments of several topics are included in sections labelled ‘Going
Further’.
The book also includes a detailed discussion of historically important types
of brass instrument, both for their intrinsic interest and because many have
v
When a musician is presented with an unfamiliar instrument, the natural reaction is
to investigate its properties and musical possibilities. If the instrument in question
is a member of the brass family, the player can attempt to sound it by buzzing
the lips against the mouthpiece, searching out the most easily playable notes and
investigating its timbral and expressive possibilities. Experimenting systematically
in this way is quite close to the approach that would be adopted by a scientist asked
to investigate the properties of the instrument. Initial experiments could be carried
out by subjecting the instrument itself to laboratory tests of various types, but to
arrive at a complete understanding of its purpose and possibilities, it is necessary to
study the way in which the player interacts with the instrument.
Our understanding of how brass instruments work has developed greatly over
the last few decades. Valuable coverage of brass instruments is available in several
textbooks on musical instrument acoustics, including Fundamentals of Musical
Acoustics (Benade 1976), The Musician’s Guide to Acoustics (Campbell and
Greated 1987), The Physics of Musical Instruments (Fletcher and Rossing 1998)
and Acoustics of Musical Instruments (Chaigne and Kergomard 2016), but to our
knowledge this is the first monograph dealing exclusively with instruments sounded
by lip vibration. It includes the reviews of scientific research into many aspects of
the behaviour of brass instruments undertaken in a number of centres worldwide and
reported on a lively conference circuit and in peer-reviewed journal articles. Areas
in which important advances have been made include the action of the player’s lips,
the effects of nonlinear sound propagation in instrument tubing, the radiation of
sound from brasswind bells, instrument taxonomy and computer modelling as an
aid to manufacturing and a tool for musical synthesis.
This book is intended to be intelligible and useful to the large number of brass
instrumentalists who take a scientific interest in their instruments and how they
are played. It is also intended to serve as an academic and research text, and
more advanced treatments of several topics are included in sections labelled ‘Going
Further’.
The book also includes a detailed discussion of historically important types
of brass instrument, both for their intrinsic interest and because many have
v