Tone Perception and Flute Compounds: Is There a Correlation?

Overview

Objectives/Goals The objective was to determine whether there was a correlation between the type or placement of metal in a flute and the tone quality that an audience would perceive. My hypothesis was that the handmade flute with a 14k gold riser and sterling silver headjoint would outperform the other samples. Methods/Materials The materials included a sound recording system, several flutes with different metallic properties, survey for human subjects, sheet music, disinfectant, and a metronome/tuner. I played on and created a recording with the above flutes. Over 50 volunteers listened to the recording, completing the survey. They chose 1 from 4 different words describing the tone quality, and rated each flute#s tone on a rubric from 1-4. Each tone description represented the tonal "feel" (eg., pop singer vs. opera singer). The average of every flute's score and each separate tone description's percentages were computed to determine if there was a connection to metallic properties. Results The highest scoring flute had a double gold-plated lip plate and the second highest had a gold riser. Between the lowest and highest scoring flute, there was a 19.92% difference. The highest-scoring flute had 42.2% of its descriptive words as "rich" compared to a nickel flute with the lowest percentage - a 17.4%. The handmade flute with the 14k gold riser had 13% of its descriptive words as "thin" compared to the same handmade flute without the gold riser where 33.3% of its words were "thin". "Rich" was defined as "warm, powerful, strong". "Thin" was "shrill, reedy, transparent". Conclusions/Discussion My hypothesis that the handmade flute with the 14k gold riser and sterling silver head joint would have the best tone quality of my samples was unsupported because the machine-made flute with the double gold-plated lip plate and sterling silver head joint scored highest. I found there to be a correlation between the flute materials and tone perception because of the differences in tone description percentages and tone quality averages. My experiment suggests that the presence of gold in a flute makes a difference in the audible tone quality towards an audience.

Competition history

• CSEF 2008 Product Science (Physical) (Junior Division Only) · Entry J1916

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Physical Sciences projects
• CSEF Physical Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2008 project