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SpectraSax – artistic and quantitive research into the saxophone timber control by mechanical manipulation
I lead quantitative research on the acoustic phenomena of the saxophone, utilizing statistical segmentations, the creation of tens of thousands of sound samples into a database, analysis, and mathematical modeling. This groundbreaking approach transforms the concept of “extended techniques” from a vast collection of events into a comprehensive logical sequence. The statistical conclusions are translated into explanations and a novel set of tools, empowering composers, performers, and educators to comprehend, approach, and practice with unprecedented resolution and effectiveness in areas such as tone, alternative sound production techniques, micro-tuning, bisbigliando, multiphonics, harmonics, and the understanding of the instrument’s mechanical tendencies.
This newfound knowledge and tools drive significant advancements in the saxophone field, prompting a re-evaluation of existing literature, enhancing interpretative choices, fostering conscious and affective performances, and inspiring the creation of new bodies of work rooted in this expanded understanding. The recordings produced during this process establish a precedent database in terms of both volume and organization. This resource enables creators and researchers in the sound and music fields to explore instrument acoustics, refine theoretical models, develop digital and hybrid instruments, and contribute to acoustic instrument design, construction, and fine-tuning.
The innovative approach, employing disassembly, assembly, and quantitative research techniques, can be readily adapted for other woodwind instruments and, with comprehensive adjustments, extended to other instrument families. Hance introduces an epistemological shift that not only projects and reshapes classical thought but also initiates a renewed discourse on the connection between composers or performers and their experience of listening and creating as independent entities and collaborative partners in the artistic act.
Moreover, this transformative process will likely give rise to a new medium bridging internal representation (embedded sensory and semantic fields), external representation (linguistic, graphic), and sound objects. This new transparency facilitates more effective and constructive discourse, shifting from subjective impressions to a discussion grounded in facts and understanding.
The envisioned outcome involves forming partnerships across various disciplines, fostering a community, and cultivating a substantial body of work that fuels creativity, expression, experience, language, and ultimately the emergence of a new style. This community is poised to create a comprehensive knowledge base, facilitating interdisciplinary collaborations, thus, beyond its impact on the music field, this infrastructure sets the stage for a community centered around music creation and research based on empirical knowledge. Such a community revives the ancient pursuit of “effect and affect,” reinstating the musician’s historical role as the alchemist of sounds—a musician-researcher influencing mass consciousness through music, now equipped with the proper infrastructure, tools, and knowledge.
Abstract:
Artistic music dramatically evolved during the last decades, yet its epistemology remained ancient, leading to practical and theoretical difficulties. Various artistic projects I conducted during 2017-2022, in micro-tuning and spectral manipulation, led me to conduct methodological research to solve core issues of the saxophone.
During 2022, I mapped all fingering, established and perfected data methodology and theory of tone, and recorded and analyzed 20K samples. Preliminary results allowed for addressing core problems of contemporary techniques and the development of new tools for thinking and playing. Completing the recordings (~100K), and analytical process in 2024 will allow an unprecedented well-sorted sound archive and a comprehensive understanding and language of tone.
Collaborations with composers and sound artists will yield a substantial oeuvre, enabling rigorous testing and refinement of novel saxophone theory and tools. This innovation may extend to all wind instruments, potentially catalyzing epistemological advances and forging connections between science and music.
Background:
The question at the center of my research is straightforward: How can a player manipulate the saxophone sound? The most obvious answers would be pitch, loudness, and time. Although the answers to these questions may seem apparent, a more in-depth approach would ask if we can play only in equal-temperament, as the instrument was designed to, or if using microtones is possible? Another interesting question would be the control of formants (how strong are the overtones sounding), and can we control these “inner-loudness” parameters? If yes, how exactly and to which degree?
The answer is more complicated, as it lies in crossing two knowledge gaps and opposing epistemologies. The first is how we collect and deliver valuable information regarding how to play musical instruments, and the second regards how science is building its knowledge and how far it has reached in this domain.
The instrumental technique is as ancient as our cultural history; from the moment our ancestors realized an action emits a sound, an inseparable bond was made between acoustic appreciation and the gesture or technique. The winds family is well known for its tonal flexibility, second only to the human voice. Even in this particular family of design features, the saxophone had an advantage: its conical metal body allows a strong sound emission, and its single reed offers increased tonal flexibility. The technology of maintaining and delivering this research into action-sound relied traditionally on oral tradition. In Later periods, as literacy spread, as did the available means of registering this information, a mixed tradition of text-reliant teaching evolved, having master’s generated texts with minimal text and explanations and much practicing techniques and examples. The core idea was, and still is for musical education, that by following our masters-ancestors footsteps, we will revive their experience, regaining their revelations and insights. This approach’s many advantages, such as individual development, self-reliance, independent research, and wide liberty of interpretation, which can also become a prolific gap for innovation, holds a significant limitation. As every student has to build his knowledge base from scratch, it becomes a question of how far and deep an individual can go through, accumulate, and pass on during his lifetime. This limitation of the human ability to learn, memorize, summarize, and utilize this knowledge is well known, and choosing to become an artist can be regarded in this sense as a life dedicated to the construction and maintenance of this palace of knowledge, and hopefully leaving behind enough plans and notes for others to follow.
Charming, appealing, and “down to earth,” as it sounded to me during most of my artistic development, this tradition bears two considerate limitations: the first is that the construction of knowledge is also based upon the slow building of wisdom, primarily verified by peers. Hence, once stripped from “peer review,” the structure of knowledge is merely conventions regarding personal impressions. Hence, introducing concretely verified information to this knowledge system, which is detached from its epistemology, presents a massive risk, as it may challenge the agreed-upon conventions, undercutting the structure of knowledge and power. I will say it most straightforwardly: Classic music teaching tradition is intolerant to scientific approaches and concrete knowledge. We remind somehow the ultra-orthodox: accepting progress only once it cannot be repressed anymore, as it has become too widespread among the population (like smartphones), with many restrictions (kosher phones) while repressing its epistemological basis (it is not done by science, but it is a miracle). It is important to emphasize this point to understand how music has become so distant from academic discussion and failed to evolve as a research field.
The second field is science, or more precisely, the different fields of research surrounding musical practice: many of them are relatively young and complex, such as psychoacoustics and neuroscience, acoustics and the use of fluid dynamics theory and modeling, all need a high degree of education, tools, and effort to answer rudimentary questions: how we hear, or how sound is produced in wind instruments. In both cases, all the literature I could find points to the reality that the processes and phenomena already explained by science are outside the scope of becoming useful to the practitioner. Practical questions such as: in which terms does a read vibrate? or what determines the timber? They are being recently explored with initially promising results. Still, unfortunately, they are being addressed with a high orientation towards mechanical description and lacking the variety of information, processing, and delivery so much needed to shed light on practical musical issues.
Into this gap of knowledge, I hope to introduce experiments, premeditated by “my” core questions as an interpreter and artist, and design experiments that will allocate the relevant information to answer these questions.
SpectraSax project was designed to answer how can an experienced player technically manipulate his timber. In the following few pages, I will show how the process grew from my prior artistic collaborations and developed into scientific research, promising to advance our knowledge in many fields. I want to stress that I did not intend to make science, nor did I want to become a scientist. I am content being a performing musician, an interpreter of new and old music, a collaborator of composers, an educator, and many other things I did before and hope to keep doing in the future. Yet my artistic projects led me on a path that showed me that there is a body of knowledge waiting to be revealed, and I happened to devise a plan to do so. I am also fortunate to have my wife as a partner for life for this research. She is a scientist who is also an expert in bioacoustics and data analysis, and through much discussion, her advice regarding scientific study design and her will to support the process as long as it takes, have allowed me to make a mental leap and dedicate myself to this journey.
Composer – Player – Audience (CPA) project was launched in 2017, took five years to complete, and was a decisive step for me to become a mature artist. What I did not know at the time was that I was practicing “artistic research” and that the preliminary question was a naïve one but exciting: “Assuming the interpreter invests any amount of time and effort in developing the composer’s basic knowledge, many experimentation, played drafts and performances as needed, will the result become of a different nature, quality, artistic achievement?.
This question propelled different collaborations and allowed many personal discoveries:
Small lies – For an interpreter, baritone saxophone, tape, and electronics by Ophir Ilzetzki (2018-2019)
This piece’s high degree of freedom is a direct outcome of the deep trust built during the process, which allowed for a unique and deep investigation. The second phase of the piece is a spoken text into the mouthpiece. I speak the same text three times in a row into the mouthpiece, but the reactions are different every time as I switch to different groups of multiphonics. This variety was achieved by grouping or rearranging the multiphonics of the baritone saxophone by resistance or facility of producing them and their reaction to different air pressures. Another exciting process was that during the central part of the piece, the saxophone is asked to follow a rapid spoken text. The initial effort was invested in finding the pitches and being able to notate them and remember the text so that the two would theoretically merge. The insight emerging from my practicing was that intensity, timbre, articulation, and the fast, dynamically changing contours of the spoken text are probably much more dominant and essential factors than we tend to see in “classical playing,” and many adaptations in playing technique were needed.
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Pinholes – for baritone saxophone, contrabass, and electronics by Eran Sachs (2018)
It was a project concerning a theoretical question: can we address different ways of tuning through the saxophone, and if we do, which kind of new sandbox will emerge? What would they sound like? The chosen path was to create two parallel systems of tuning: one which emerges from multiplications of a very low frequency (10.96HZ), forming a detailed coverage of the spectrum (by the contrabass and electronics) and another scale, emerging from an unequal, yet symmetric scale of 29 notes in one octave for the saxophone. Locating the correct fingering for each note for three octaves on the alto saxophone took about two months of searching, and after one rehearsal, the composer suggested switching to the baritone saxophone; it took two more months. This process taught me how to look for minute tunning through fingerings, and schooled me deeply regarding the correlation (and surprises) that happens when applying special fingering combinations, and assured me what I already suspected: that it is possible to tune accurately to any given pitch, it is only a question of perseverance.
Siete Dolores – for tenor saxophone and electronics by Gil Dori (2019)
After a few initial discussions regarding what can be a novelty in saxophone writing, I pointed to an interesting phenomenon: the mouthpiece can produce very different sound types while using distinct sound production techniques. This versatility is utilized in two ways: assuming the player is not aware of this agility – he usually tries to achieve dynamic balance throughout the instrument’s range while correcting his embouchure position by feeling. In contrast, advanced players will utilize this flexibility to correct intonation or tone quality. In the case of a very well-classically-educated player, this flexibility is premeditatedly learned and practiced to achieve a homogeneous sound, perfect intonation, and complete dynamic control. Our idea was to reverse the process! Instead of using this flexibility and ability to battle against the elements, reducing everything to be mellow and uniform, we decided to explore how far and extreme we can develop the saxophone sound and tone. So, we launched our ambitious attempt to utilize a technical idea regarding saxophone tone production as the core idea of a new piece. I established seven different embouchure positions (Figure 1A) that emitted distinct sound types (hence “Siete Dolores”); a notation style was developed, and automatic timber recognition was applied (Figure 1B). From a musicological point of view, the piece is a strict serial piece; the main series is the colors completing a cycle once every four minutes, rotating every cycle seven times in total, covering the whole sound pallet. At the same time, the pitches and dynamics are relatively constant, as they were given minor significance, enabling the color rotation. This strict approach was designed to reveal edges and hidden corners of the sonority and negate my long-time habit of “centralizing” the sound. The two-year process of developing the piece, its notation, acknowledging that the timber recognition device will not work, making the scrolling video score, and first and foremost, relearning how to play, distancing my ears from immediately asking my body to centralize the tone, intonation, and dynamics have promoted new kinds of playing, self-listening, and aesthetic appreciations. It was an experiment in expanding the Umwelt, which left an immense impression of how little I knew and how much is yet to be discovered.
Figure 1. Siete Dolores research (A) Seven different embouchure positions. (B) Tone recognition device.
Respirar – for tenor saxophone and live electronics by Gil Dori (2021)
is the direct descendant of our prior collaboration and has implemented many of the essential conclusions we have arrived at during “Siete Dolores.” I developed the seven embouchure positions into a theoretical model of Air-Sound (Figure 2A), and Gil substituted the sound-color recognition device with a real-time spectral multiplier (Figure 2B), which records a few ms of one note, stores it in a buffer, and then plays it through the spectrum of a new sound, creating a fused new identity. In addition, the system of position/note/dynamic – describing detached actions with unexpected and unshaped sonic outcomes was used in combination with the new air-to-sound theory – which allows for describing detailed expected sonic outcomes shaped by the new model. Thus creating a multi-facet approach to playing and aesthetic self-assessment. Also, in this case, many problems and questions were raised about why there is so much discrepancy between seemingly identical sampling? Is the theoretical model reliable enough, or am I persuading myself? Can color be a primary perceived attribute? or does it have to play a secondary role to pitch and loudness? Despite all our efforts, have we managed to divide these attributes?
Figure 2. Respirar research. (A) theoretical model of Air-Sound. (B) sound-color recognition device with a real-time spectral multiplier
I Met Mateo through a commission made for Ensemble SEV. We were to play new pieces by students for ensemble and voice for Milano Musica, and one of those pieces was by Mateo. The remarkable thing about his piece was that he asked the saxophone to produce different colors of the same pitch, not through embouchure or general suggesting, but to do so using fingerings. Having prior experience in different projects such as Pinhole and Siete Dolores, I knew this Idea was a double-edged dagger: it promises clear and precise color transitions, yet it poses problems in tuning, airflow, and more. The piece went well, but during the work on my part and the tutti playing, I was shocked at how different it felt to be aware of tone and balance while implying many new timbral fingerings. I imagined how perfecting this technique would open new artistic spaces and notions. Gazing into this void, I fell in love.
Three etudes – By Mateo Servian Sforza (2021) With my first opportunity, I suggested to Mateo further develop this idea together, and so started our collaboration. First, we decided to make short etudes, which will allow me to discover more fingering options and practice the new playing technique, and Mateo to explore further the saxophone, its different phenomena, and the aesthetic language he will develop later in a complete piece. This process took a few months of work and allowed many advances, such as a larger pool of fingering (and colors) for each note, developing color notation stave, and more.
K – For tenor saxophone solo by Mateo Servian sforza (2021-2022) Two weeks before the premiere of “Three Etudes,” I received an email from Mateo containing a new piece named “K.” I was surprised yet happy that our work found its way into a creative surge, producing a new piece. The premier was challenging, yet I was delighted that many ideas we hoped to develop had become practical tools in an excellent new composition. Yet, many problems were raised: Mateo made an outstanding selection of practical and noticeable fingering scales of color, but his fingerings were very much out of tune, to the point I was not sure whether I was playing and hearing a fluctuation of color or pitch or both, and what is more dominant? In addition, the fingerings were not well correlated with the air-pressure fluctuations they created, nor balanced in resistance, making the dynamic control a considerable challenge.
After consulting how we should continue, we decided to keep developing the bank of fingering, primarily by trying to discover more of them and arrange them into logical and easy-to-understand progressive charts, slowly covering the whole saxophone. I also asked permission (and was granted) to present a corrected fingering chart for K, which will address many of the issues discussed before, as the fingering was supposed to be by individual selection and not dictated. I doubted the possibility of efficiently covering all the saxophone(s) range, as I was unsure how long it would take to “find the formula” or achieve a practical, comprehensive coverage of the saxophone family. Yet, we started. This process, too, took a few fatiguing months of examining new possibilities, playing long notes, comparing by hearing and sorting the possibilities. Mateo developed a beautiful and practical tree diagram of families of color, allowing technical mobility. I felt this classification deals with color nuance and is not a clear criterion once dynamics are introduced, so I developed linear general brightness and tuning, X(brightness) and Y(pitch) display, presenting many well-assorted fingerings (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Fingering diagrams which were developed for “K”. Fingering variation for (A) Note A1 (B) F#.
Despite the long and arduous process, It was instrumental for me to develop two different facets: First, slowly developing the playing technique needed to manipulate color while balancing tuning and dynamic fluctuations caused by the special fingerings, and also, to develop a more detailed listening ability to the harmonics structures and “quality of tone” slowly growing out of the rigorous and uniform “classical indoctrination.” The second was internalizing that my methodology of testing and presentation, which was based on intuitive search, playing, listening, and repeated comparison, is a lovely way to arrange only a small number of possibilities. As the work on the fingering charts progressed, I figured I might have missed a few possibilities, so I made a statistical analysis on note A, which I thought I had sorted satisfactorily, the answer was 288 options, very far from the 50-60 options I had sorted and thought were enough (Figure 4).
Figure 4. First steps of methodological thinking. Presentation of the difference between intuitive and statistical realization of fingering combinations.
I had no other option but to run this test for all the saxophone notes, which revealed the sheer scale of possibilities and combinations — 655,360. It was not a possible number to sort manually. A change of plan was needed.
The next step was a breakdown of all fingering possibilities and the realization that I must make a “cold analysis” – to record my impressions and compare or analyze them later. I started again, playing long notes, writing my impressions, and slowly building a database of tuning and harmonics impressions: low mid high, and mentioning extraordinary phenomena like multiphonics or unique harmonics).
This method went faster than the previous technique, and I was thrilled as I could feel that I advanced nicely, acquiring (playing and describing) about 100 samples by dedicating roughly three hours a day. But after a week and a half, acquiring about 600 samples, I realized it would take me two years to sample to cover the whole instrument, and worse, once rechecking my notes, I had to admit that I still had a problem with the consistency of my growing database, as it is merely a collection of my impressions, with no possibility of verification. All the above led me to the current phase of my research.
SpectraSax research project was designed to address many of the challenges and failure points in previous attempts and allow a breakthrough. A few decisions were made:
To address the first two points, I wrote a code that generated all possible fingering combinations by order, considering the mechanisms that eliminated many and registering only valid possibilities as a line in a CSV chart. This chart is later fed to a max patch that I created and is my interface for the experiment. The experiment is conducted in my studio and includes a setup of two far microphones (Neuman 184) for the far field 250 cm, one AT4050 30 cm in front of the bell, and one DPA 4099 on the bell. The mic position and calibration are kept to ensure the samples are as reliable as possible, each recording into a separate channel in 48khz/16bit. Each sample is obtained by me playing a given fingering scheme, presented on the screen before me; I play the note and press a switch pedal. The playing is then recorded for two seconds, registering the “body of note” – the duration in which loudness and tone are stabile, approximately 200ms after the note’s start and before allowing decay. I play with the same inner pressure, which I usually push through the instrument to receive a full-body, not-too-loud Forte, and I wear earbuds to protect my hearing, mask the tone, and prevent bias. After each sample is recorded, I can save it and continue to the next one, or if I am not content, I record it once more. Different safety protocols are applied, such as displaying averages and deviation of dynamics, tuning, and harmonic content, which I monitor after each recorded sample (Link to a breakdown of the max patch and recording studio).
Preliminary results:
The process of fully understanding the saxophone mechanism led to a graphic chart representing a breakdown of all the fingering combinations (Figure 5). I was able to record 20480 samples, representing the first iterative step of the process, including recording done on the alto saxophone within its low octave and c1 open variations: notes (amount of samples): D1(4), Eb1(8), E1(16), F1(32), F#+G(64), Tf(128), G#(32), A(288) Ta(576), 1p(1152), B(256), 1Tc(2560), 1open(5120), C1 open(10240)).
Figure 5. A graphic chart representing a breakdown of all the fingering combinations (a link to a higher resolution image).
The many hours of recording have propelled many improvements in automatization, playing and recording technique stability, and stamina, significantly improving the number of recordings I could produce every day from ~150 to ~1200. In addition, playing long stable notes for about three hours a day allowed me to develop further my air control and feel of how fingering affects venting and tone and how the two interact.
The preliminary analysis was based on a statistical analysis done in Matlab of intensity measurements for every 0.02 ms / 1 hz increments (1-20k). This highly detailed scan of each sample allowed a reliable average extraction of pitch and intensity and an in-depth look at the harmonic series fluctuation.
All notes have shown pitch and intensity trades: the more open the fingering is – the more likely the note to have a higher pitch and loudness. For example, this trend can be seen in the pitch and Intensity of Bb(p), all notes pitch, all notes intensity (Figure 6), and the two trends showed clear correlations.
Figure 6. Pitch and intensity trends. (A) pitch and (B) Intensity of Bb(p), (C) all notes pitch, and (D) all notes intensity,
From these initial results, we can derive a few findings: the initial assumption and intuition that closer keys to the first open hole have more impact on venting and brightness are correct. In addition, multiple keys have more impact than fewer, which is logical and unsurprising. Yet, we can also see an apparent increase in intensity and pitch once multiple consecutive keys have been closed, especially in resonating sweet spots of the Quinta and Octave located 3/2 and 2/1 length of the tube after the initial opening (Figure 7). This phenomenon of energy or resonance jumps was found in all relative cases and relative venting relations (Figure 6C-D), which points to the fact that it is a physical phenomenon recurring in similar acoustic manipulation states.
Figure 7. Intensity and pitch increase when multiple consecutive keys have been closed (A) Intensity of Bb(1p), (B) frequency of Bb(1p), and (C) frequency of C(tc).
It is yet to be explored which relations, locations, or constellations of fingering promote this exception from the main trend, and whether it is a phenomenon that relates to the intensity of the airflow is yet to be analyzed. I suspect intensity is not a dominant variable in this case and is an expression of sympathetic resonance, happening regardless of intensity fluctuation. Yet, it is less noticeable in low intensities as the projected harmonic is considerably lower than the core tone and is almost below room noise in relatively low intensities.
Another very noticeable deviation from the main trend is the phenomenon called “multiphonics” (MP), usually regarded in the literature as multi-notes, sometimes referring to a clear harmonic heard and other times to the appearance of multiple notes with different qualities of sonority. The in-depth scan of the fingering possibilities allowed me to experience this phenomenon in an unfamiliar way. While recording the samples, I did not find individual MP here and there, as they are usually regarded in literature, but consecutive fields of a few to a few tenths of closely sounding and reacting MP. This new revelation propelled further investigation and examination, implying different air pressures, embouchure positions, and partial fingering. Also, I have taken a closer look at the diagrams enabled by the high-resolution scan. A comparative look at the intensity patterns (Figure 8A) quickly revealed that the “MP” appears in cases where a dynamic envelope has a clear saw pattern, whereas the “clean notes” are seen as a uniform mass of sound. Please take another look at the figure while listening to the successive recordings of F. This was also Immediately evident while recording, but an even more radical zoom-in (Figure 8B-C) revealed an interesting phenomenon: any “body of sound” or a stable tone in the saxophone could be addressed as increasingly growing patterns, starting from the main pattern of the core frequency, later it’s overtones, and then slowly zooming out into higher layers of patterns of fluctuation of energy (Figure 8D). The difference between the MP and the normal tones was most apparent in the highest energy pattern. The clean notes showed a very slow or shallow, almost unnoticeable pattern, whereas the MP showed a faster, noticeable one. This realization led me to hypnotize that the multiphonics phenomenon is only a perceived energy pattern fluctuation. It is always there, usually too slow or shallow to notice. Yet, we do not address this core identity of the sonority, and it is perceived as “instability of playing” or “character of the sound.” When disturbing to the player, it is a “venting problem.” Apparently, part of being an adept player is unknowingly training yourself to negate these phenomena by adjusting the air pressure and anticipating the intensity fluctuation. Another way to look at this is that every sound bears an envelope, and the MP’s are sound notes with a perceivable envelope pattern. After playing a little with this finding, I can also predict that the “new notes” introduced by the MP are a combination of bawe note, new pitch(es) and the perceived interference pattern (pitch) that, to some degree, we can “tune” the “new tone” with air pressure and venting.
My findings and assumptions need further examination, hopefully with acoustics experts, but even at this stage, few topics come forward and raise interesting questions: how do we perceive sound? Is the outer dynamic pattern so important? Maybe a perception of sound can be regarded as the perception of different layers of intensity patterns and their fluctuations? How should we address it in practice? Can this understanding promote our understanding of color as well?
Figure 8. Intensity over time. (A) Intensity of 32 variation of F note. (B-C) Three resolutions of four different samples of F note. (D) Different patterns of energy (E) Patterns of energy as vortex.
These and many other fascinating questions are just the beginning. Yet, an even more interesting finding is that these intensity patterns are unstable. If addressed more deeply, every parameter constantly fluctuates and presents a typical vortex shape, Leading to my next point. As this is all physics, and it looks like a vortex (Figure 8E), it is most probable that a fluid-dynamic theory can give a final answer. Different forces come into play in this theory: the fluctuation of energy in the mouthpiece, recurring pressure, Bernuli’s law, the tube length, how much it is open to outer space, friction, temperature, and more. There seem to be endless factors, yet there is hope! Having accumulated so many demonstrations of sound, which results from the air pressure dynamics of the hydraulic system (the saxophone), so well sorted and connected to predictable venting situations, can be used to form a highly effective calibration tool for a Model. I work on and hope to find a scientist with the capacity in programming and mathematics; together, utilizing the sound archive, we can unify this phenomenon into one equation, one field of knowledge.
Explaining the forces playing in the color manipulation by fingering through a physical model would be fabulous, still, it is a niche for advanced players and can be used chiefly in advanced education, contemporary and experimental music, and instrument building and tuning. The more promising path for a model and a broader audience application is the explanation of intensity and mouthpiece position fluctuations, as presented in the artistic path With Dr.Dori. Recording this archive is next in line and will occur between late 2023 and 2024. I will use multiple repetitions and different approaches to prevent inaccuracies and bias, accumulating in the first stage 88,000 recordings (70 soundfiled*30notes=2100 * 10 repetitions * Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone). This step will allow us closer than ever to the complete spread of possibilities and to establish a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between air pressure, embouchure, reed, and mouthpiece, which by now is primarily explained by rough theory and is utterly unpractical for music-making and teaching.
Regardless of the potential I see in cooperation with a fluid-dynamic expert scientist, I have already found and started developing exciting ways of locating and addressing these phenomena practically. As I am almost certain these phenomena are relative (both fingering and air/position), I have created a tool to explain and reduce the vast diversity into practical language I call “zip code.” The concept is to accurately tie the acoustic phenomena with its fingering pattern and create families of typical sonority and defined areas of the phenomenon regardless of its note and dynamic. This step may be redundant for note F – having only 32 variations, yet for having a common language with A (288) and C# (5120), it is crucial (link to conversion process)
Assuming there will be a Fluid Dynamic model for the saxophone, I believe that with the correct alterations, all wind would be deciphered, one by one, with considerably less effort than the initial instrument, and that a model of wind will soon arise. Even if no one is to pick up the gauntlet immediately, the archive will be there waiting for the right person, and so will I. In any case, the concept, including the formation of the well-sorted sound archived, its statistical analysis, and the development of practical tools, are enough to be adopted (with minor modifications) to any wind instrument and, with more considerable adaptation, to other families.
I foresee that the next step of air/position recordings and analysis will point in the same direction and reductive practical language, constructed from the many samples achieved and its analysis, allowing a system to calibrate the whole saxophone (and saxophones family) range and sonority correctly.
I believe and hope that the compilation of enough iterative steps, analysis, creation of a reliable theoretical model, and better still, a physical-based model, with considerable responsibility, alongside careful and thoughtful adaptation to practical tools, a body of clear explanations addressed to different levels and users, and much perseverance, will carry a fundamental impact, and with time, will make a fundamental shift for acoustic instruments culture and their future.
The future tools for composers and performers look very promising regarding artistic implementations. They did so with prior collaborations, and now, using the zip code system in its raw and initial form already simplifies my practice and allows new ways of thinking. Attached is a map of multiphonics, which locates the different parallel interference patterns and sorts them in new ways; it is part of a piece I am working on, allowing gradual diffusion between MP (“Beatles” from microtones, piece in process)
The idea of the well-sorted sound archive sparks endless ideas: a keyboard having two expression pedals/wheels, one for the dynamics and the other for fingerings, or an X/Y pad to travel across the colors/dynamics; new synth algorithms, taking into account the findings of multilayer cycles, cycling together and forming complex expression as in real life; developing analytical tools which can detect deviations from expected sonority, pointing how to set-up the instrument or, or repair a pad, and the endless forms of better and more aware education tools; countless artistic expressions which can emerge from a hybrid approach to playing and fast response algorithms recognizing the innermost subtle changes in playing.
The possibilities and my dreams are endless. But I learned that it is not good I fantasize too much, as when meeting my collaborators (usually composers), if I come up with too many ideas and things I plan to do, regardless of their ideas, I tend to swamp the discussion and reduce their vision, consequently limiting how far I can fly with them. So I should cut them here, focus on doing good work now and in the future, and wish for the support and acceptance of my community. Radical and dreamy as I may sound, I hope you can see how my path and yours can meet and nourish each other.
With great respect,
Jonathan
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