Terry, a friend of mine attended a college course where the instructor challanged the class to determine the type of instrument being played just by listening to a recorded tone (A 440) of each instrument with the attack and decay portion of the tone removed. No one in the class could distinguish any of the instruments. I am not sure he is correct but I wonder if what he said is perhaps a clue as to one reason we can recognize different instruments. David Koelzer Vintage Pianos DFW Dave, With all due respect, was this a class for music majors or was it for a music/art curricular course for non majors? I could understand non-majors having trouble deciphering the differences but skilled music majors who live and breathe this stuff...I'd had to wager that the test would have entirely different results. Quite frankly their are tremendous tonal differences between the flute, clarinet, oboe, sax, trumpet...you name it. Even the minute differences between all the reed instruments (clarinet, sax, and oboe) are quite unique in their tonal waves due to their size, bore, size, reed configuration and most importantly, scaling. Otherwise an orchestra would not sound like an orchestra but rather a resemblance of a piano (if you will) only with respective instruments being played. Now if there was a more fascinating debate, find out how you could take the same exact instrument and give it to 10 different players of all different skill levels get 10 entirely different tonal qualities. It would be like one piano could be made to sound like a Betsy Ross spinet, and the next player could literally transform it into a Steinway D. Tom Servinsky, RPT
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC