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Re: Blowing terminology

Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2008-09-27 10:24

OK, let's do #1 and #2 in the reverse order.

I find I can do the 'thinning' and 'fattening' manoeuvres, getting quite large changes of waistline, however full my lungs are. (It definitely feels, by the way, that I can be really quite 'fat' and still relaxed; if I push 'out' at that stage I can make myself only a little bit fatter.)

What's more, I can do this with my airway open -- that's to say, without blocking it as I do when I cough, for example. It may be that the diaphragm OPERATES (by increasing and decreasing its downward push, NOT by moving) so as to make that possible....but of course I can't tell....:-)

So that's the basis of my claim that this manoeuvre is irrelevant to blowing the clarinet.

With regard to intercostals, I find that my ribcage moves little, if at all, in normal clarinet playing. If I have to take an ENORMOUS breath, of course, then I expand my ribcage; but the experience of blowing afterwards is still the same as usual. If I think about it at all, I imagine the extra air available to be a sort of reserve tank that empties itself naturally as I approach the end of the breath.

I don't see why you have trouble with the idea that breathing in is doable just by diaphragm action. When we learnt a bit about the body in school biology, they demonstrated the action of the diaphragm using a couple of balloons inside a belljar. The balloons were attached to a tube open to the air through the neck of the belljar, and the bottom of the belljar was covered with a sheet of thick rubber. Pushing up on this rubber sheet deflated the balloons, and releasing it reinflated them. In this model, the belljar, representing the thorax, DIDN'T MOVE, of course.

The rubber sheet was held firmly all round the bottom of the belljar by a piece of string wound round and round -- it looked rather like the paper cover on a jar of homemade jam, but upside down. I don't know exactly how the diaphragm is attached to our ribcage, but I can imagine that it's effectively the same sort of thing.

As a model of the diaphragm the rubber sheet is defective, of course: you have to push up on it in the middle to make it dome-shaped. Whereas the diaphragm is dome-shaped when relaxed; it's when it OPERATES that it tries to pull the ribcage in, and can't, so it flattens.

Just finally, a word about muscles; you should include in your mental model of them that they can be at various lengths when relaxed. You can see this by horizontally manipulating your relaxed right arm with your left, so that it moves between being straight and being bent; the biceps change length even though they are relaxed. At any stage in that process you can try to bend your right arm against your left arm control, and watch your biceps try to shorten from whatever length they're currently at.

Tony

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Blowing terminology new

Arnoldstang

2008-09-18 15:10