EMPIRICAL STUDY OF THE DESIGN OF MOUTHPIECES FOR A THREE-HOLE PIPE

1 INTRODUCTION
The raison d'etre of three♥hole pipes is that they may be played with one hand, leaving the other
hand free to operate some percussion instrument". The principle of operation is the same as that of
many orchestral brass instruments. Rather than have a different length of tube for each note, the
overtones of each tube generate a range of notes. The frequencies of the overtones of a perfect
cylinder and a perfect cone form a harmonic series so a combination of different lengths of tube and
their overtones may be used to generate a musical scale as shown in gure 1 The fundamental is
generally discarded and the scale starts with the rst overtone one octave higher
W
Figure 1 the generation of a musical scale from the overtones of four different lengths of pipe.
 
 
 
 
 
 
The purpose of the present study is to investigate which are the important parameters of the whistle
used to excite the vibrations and to determine their optimum values for a given instrument