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Physics

Author: mschmidt
Date: 2007-08-16 23:50

How much do musicians get trained in physics? I'm not talking about what your oboe teacher tells you about physics, but what you might learn from someone who actually has a degree in the subject.

There seems to be a lot of "folk physics" associated with reeds, embouchres, oboes and the like. Some of it can be pretty readily translated into standard physics. Some of it is rather speculative, and might be considered a collection hypotheses for which there is no evidence, but for which one might do some calculations and experiments to see if there's anything to it. Then there are things which, frankly, would make a physicist chuckle and shake her head.

Does it matter? If an oboe teacher can "explain" things in terms of this "folk physics" to a student, and the student can then happily go and create a reed or an embouchre that sounds good, does it matter if the "explanation" uses physical terms in a way that is inconsistent with, or even contradicts, the way a physicist would use those same terms? Clearly the phenomena are real, and if we're only interested in pleasant sounding phenomena, who cares if what goes on inside the musician's head is inconsistent with Newtonian physics?

On the other hand, could the consistency and power of scientific physics eliminate a lot of wasted effort? So far scientific physics hasn't really helped out a whole lot; reading, for example, Nederveen, one gets the sense that they are still in the position of trying to understand why instruments designed through trial and error over centuries have the qualities they have, and the serious physicists can't contribute much of a revolutionary nature. As far as I know, nobody in serious physics really has a good model of how oboe reeds work.

But is there a middle ground? If oboists were connected enough to standard physics to at least agree on how reeds couldn't possibly work, would it help? Or not?

Mike

Still an Amateur, but not really middle-aged anymore

Post Edited (2007-08-16 23:51)

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