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Acoustical reasons for airy throat tones?

Author: Matt Locker
Date: 2005-04-07 17:30

Hello

Does anyone know the acoustical reasons for the airy throat tones? What is it about these 4 notes (G,Ab,A,Bb) that make them hard to play cleanly from an acoustical perspective?

What is people's experience with barrels & throat tones? Does a non-cylindrical (conical?) barrel improve the resonance of these tones? Does it make it worse?

My suspicions are that the dimensions of the bore in parallel with the very short distance between the closed end of the tube & the open tone holes means that it's hard to keep the oscillations flowing through the tube. What ends up happening is that the waveforms of the overtones tend to break down and become just moving air on top of the lower harmonics. I believe this is the reason the various resonance fingerings help. They tend to enforce the oscillation of the various frequencies in the cylinder by setting up nodes at the approximate correct distances. I also tend to think that a non-cylindrical barrel may help this as it would create a more pronounced impedance mismatch at a defined location in the bore, again reinforcing the resonance of the harmonics by creating a relatively consistent boundary condition for the reflections of the waveforms.

Thoughts from the acoustical experts here?

Thanks,
Matt

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