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Re: Air Pressure inside Mouth

Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2018-06-27 20:56

The sound of the clarinet is generated by the vibration of the reed against the mouthpiece, and that is driven by the pressure difference between the inside of the mouth and the inside of the instrument. The frequency of the vibration of the reed is coupled to the frequency of vibration of the current effective air column inside the instrument, so you get different notes with different fingerings.

Depending on the mouthpiece and instrument design, the pressure difference for a given dynamic can vary, so setups are termed ‘free-blowing’ or ‘resistant’, corresponding to small and large pressure differences. Players on a given setup learn to produce the sound they aspire to – or fail to produce the sound they aspire to – by varying embouchure and reed choice. There are of course schools of thought about what you SHOULD do, but an intelligent player will experiment to find what suits them. People do well on both free-blowing and resistant systems.

The system you choose limits what you can do in different ways. Thus, German, French and Italian systems tend to bias your results differently.

Though the airspeed you mention forms a part of some pedagogy, its significance is primarily metaphorical, being correlated with a mental image of tongue position. The size and shape of the mouth cavity is varied by tongue position, and though indeed air does flow down the instrument, this is not fundamental. What vibrates is the air already inside the instrument, as well as the air inside the mouth. This latter has an effect on the reed behaviour too, varying from almost negligible to quite substantial, depending on the register.

I have a horn playing friend who can play a quite acceptable note on his instrument by SUCKING; you can’t do this on a clarinet because there’s no way to make the reed vibrate. On the horn though, the lip buzz can be achieved with the air moving either in or out.

Tony

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