Posted on 08/23/2017 9:59:22 PM PDT by tang-soo
While individuals have been playing musical instruments that require vibrating lips to produce sound since before the dawn of recorded time – we need only think of the shofar, didgeridoo, and conch shell to begin a list of lip-blown aerophones of ancient origin – there is much about playing such instruments that remains a mystery. Whether thousands of years old or made last week at a modern brass instrument factory, the fundamental changes to brasses over the millennia have been those of material, construction and ergonomics rather than actual tone production. As every school child that has ever picked up a trumpet, trombone, horn, euphonium or tuba knows, all that is needed to create a sound on a brass instrument is to place one’s lips on the mouthpiece, vibrate the lips by passing air through them, and, Voilá! Another brass player is born.
Yet while trombonist and Boston-based brass pedagogue John Coffey (1907-1981) summarized his teaching with the pithy phrase, “Tongue and blow, kid,” successful brass instrument articulation and tone production actually requires a bit more understanding. Teachers and performers have written legions of books and articles about what players should do with their tongue and other members of the body’s oral cavity, but such descriptions have been hampered by an obvious problem: we cannot see inside the mouth or touch the tongue, glottis or soft palate while playing. One’s tongue cannot touch one’s tongue in order to feel one’s tongue when it is in use. It is clear that much of what has been said about the workings of the tongue during playing has been nothing more than well-meaning conjecture.
In 1897, Harold W. Atkinson summed up the difficulty that researchers faced when attempting to describe tongue’s position while speaking:
(Excerpt) Read more at thelasttrombone.com ...
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Trying to figure out how a metal object like a trombone can be used during a functional MRI scan
Bingo!
I would venture the guess that brass is non-magnetic.
Nonferrous metal
Yes, fascinating! I'm a trombonist. Forwarding this to my daughter, who plays french horn, similar stuff at work.
The article explains that. Yamaha manufactured a special trombone made of brass and other non-ferrous materials. The mouthpiece was made of plastic. The critial issue in an MRI is not metal, but any metal or alloy with iron in it. Other metals are not impacted by the magnets. good question though.
That's not true. Even a non-magnetic metallic object conducts electricity, and an electrical conductor experiences a force when it moves through a magnetic field.
If you take a piece of copper and push it between the pole pieces of a high-power magnet, you will feel a resistive force, as though you were pushing against an invisible viscous medium; this effect is described by Lenz's law.
Also, there is an all-plastic trombone called a "pBone," made by Warwick Music Ltd. in the UK.
Yes. My son and I march in the Ohio State University alumni marching band every year and several alumni members started using the plastic from ones. For one thing they are much lighter and play with pretty much the same quality.
A good idea would be to actually read the article.
Fun fact:
The tongue is the only muscle in the human body not connected at both ends.
As a male....I am not to sure about that.
LOL! Exactly. Did not have time to read at first. Did not mean for it to sound smarmy. Was truly trying to picture it.
Have finally had time to read it - this is way cool.
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