Another thread got me thinking about this. I usually am a pucker player, unless I'm doing splits, but I've noticed that often I have my lips wider than a single hole but I'm only playing a single note.
If you hold your harmonica in front of your face a couple inches, so it's not touching, and you blow gently you can get a couple reeds to sound, and with a little focus you can get just one to sound. Of course, out in front of your face you are probably doing that by tightening your pucker. Try bringing the harp into your mouth but do it with a wide pucker so you are aiming at more than one hole. Can you get it so only one hole sounds?
This seems to be what I'm doing by default. As best as I can figure it I'm creating a aiming channel with the back of my tongue, aiming at just one hole. It seems to be a fairly fast and low friction way of playing a few holes without really moving the harp much. I've described, a couple other times, that I angle my harp, not up and down, but side to side, to change what notes I'm playing. That seems to fit with the idea. If the channel of air is being aimed from farther back a small adjustment to the angle of the harp moves that column to another hole.
I haven't heard anyone else describe doing this. Am I playing weird, or am I just noticing something we all are doing but aren't paying attention to? It seems if this is something we all do (or even some of us do) that this could be useful to describe, particularly to people starting out trying to get single holes cleanly.
Yeah, you'll get a thin tone if you keep it out there, but I was finding even when I have the harp jammed way in my mouth I wasn't really blocking side holes at all. I'd have 3-4 holes in my mouth but I'd only be blowing on one, and I wasn't tongue blocking, at least not in any traditional sense.
Yeah i have thought about this as well.I started out as a puckerer, you know as in each individual note got an 'individual' pucker.I've just picked up a harp and i find that i now cover at least 3 holes with my pucker embouchure without consciously trying to do so .It just seems to have naturally evolved that way on the journey to getting a bigger resonant sound chamber.
My thought on this is that once you make a seal around the harp with your lips, it is the air pressure generated by the lungs and diaphragm and volume of the oral cavity that make the difference, any air stream effects become insignificant. I have seen instructional materials that say to direct the air stream up or down to bend or overblow. I have no doubt these visualization techniques can work for some students, but not because yo are actual directing the air stream. An experiment to demonstrate this is to turn the harp over and note that the bend or overblow occurs with the same technique, no matter which way the harp is oriented.
The reality is that most look at the dimensions of a single hole and feel that one must "purse" the lips down to that size.
The truth is that - laterally, you have the width of the hole PLUS the posts on either side of that hole which actually triples the size of the efficient embouchure to achieve a single note.
Also, vertically you have the length of the hole PLUS the cover plates above and below.
So, the relaxed lips (NO PURSING, that causes muscle tension) can actually be a large hole moving air into the chamber of the harmonica for a single note.
Tilting the harmonica up 45 degrees also helps with this relaxed approach. One can let their upper lip really hang over the top of the harmonica without fear of playing more than a single note. ---------- The Iceman
I'm with Iceman.....I play with the tilt and my lips are always relaxed. Avoid using muscles to shape your lips. When I play a single note, the hole on either side is being block by my lower lip. With only a subtle adjustment you can go from single note to double stop or three hole chord. Also, no problem switching between this and TB splits ---------- www.facebook.com/catfishfryeband
It is amazing how far you can put the harp in your mouth and how much of the harp your outer lips can cover, and yet you can still get a single note.
Brass players sometimes use a clear acrylic mouthpiece so an accomplished player can show a novice what the embouchure inside the mouthpiece looks like, and for the novice to find out that there is a difference between what they think they are doing and what actually occurs I wonder if something similar could be done with the harmonica?
I've found that when I pucker, and stop blowing, I can use my tongue to feel the holes on either side of the note are open. Try puckering a single note, then give a quick blast of extra air without changing you lips. You'll probably get a couple extra notes.
Iceman, I'm not sure what you are no no no-ing. I am playing with a very relaxed embouchure... in fact, my lips are so loose that they flow back and forth with the covers rather than staying in the middle. Maybe I'm describing it wrong?
What I'm saying is that I can have several holes in my mouth, no lips or tongues blocking them anywhere, and that I can still get just one note. I don't angle the harp up or down, but I do change the angle subtlely side to side to change which hole (of the 3 or 4 that are in my mouth at a given time) I am blowing into. The harp is far enough into my mouth that I start running out of room for my finger along the back.
One of the reasons I started this thread is I had never heard anyone mention doing this. I can get at least 4 holes open in my mouth and only be playing one.
I've also had people shush me when I try to describe how I play warbles, because I tilt the ends of the harp back and forth instead of either sliding the harp or shaking my head. The style I'm describing you could play any of those 4 holes even if your lips were superglued to the covers- without tongue blocking.
STME58, maybe with fiber optics? It would be tough. There is that video on Turboharp that shows a moving x-ray of embouchure, but it isn't really tied with specific techniques, and as a side view for this particular embouchure it probably wouldn't be helpful. Maybe with a light in the mouth and a very specialized comb- clear on the back, but dark slots? Maybe a clear acrylic could have the inside of the slots painted? I don't have the tools to pull it off.
Philosofy, yeah, that's a manifestation of what I'm talking about. It's got to have something to do with creating a stable column of air farther back in your mouth, although it's got to be more complicated than that, because I can do it on draw notes to. Maybe it's got something to do with 'tuning your mouth to the frequency'. I've heard a couple people describing bends that way.
Harpdude, I sometimes do the blocking with the lower lip too. I've heard people describe that separately from pucker as lip blocking, and at least descriptively, I'm inclined to believe it's a valid distinction.
The only time I ever play with what would be described as 'pure pucker' if you make the distinction between pucker and lip blocking and whatever it is I am doing with lots of holes in my mouth is if I am trying to play a very light, pure sounding note. For that I play very softly with a pucker. I had a discussion with Christelle once with what sort of came down to margins of error. When you play with a pure pucker, like you would to kiss your grandma, you have very little margin for error with the flow of air. Even a slight pulsing gets heard. You have much more margin for error when the harp is deeper in your mouth. There are a few occasions when you may actually want that sound (maybe on a fading resolve when you go up an octave at the end of a song?), but it's not really a bluesy sound.
@Narcoran:The embouchure you described sounds so familiar. So you're not alone, we both play weird!
Although I switched to tongue blocking, I still use it around the lower 3 holes. I have described my embouchure to several experienced teachers and they all pulled a face as if they saw water burning. I always thought this was called U-Blocking although my tongue doesn't really block/touch the holes on the side. I think I do curl my tongue a bit in a U shape. My theory is that I create a tiny vortex with the curvature of my tongue. But yeah it's a theory, not sure how to prove it. (Maybe someone a Dyson could help us out!?) I also have a crease in the middle of my tongue, maybe that's part of it? When I play I have 3 to 4 open holes in my mouth and I can play them all with just shifting my tongue left to right without moving the harp or chin. If I pull my tongue slightly back and forth I'll get a chord slap (Not as thick/strong as when TBlocked). Does that sound familiar to you? What I have noticed is that my face is completely relaxed, the harp is pretty deep in my mouth, my jaw lowered so the cavity is still big and that the tone is much better than when I pucker. The tip of my tongue rests on the bottom of the harp and that makes it really easy to bend in a controlled way (it's the back of my tongue that moves).
I can play a tune (blow and draw) with the harp out of my mouth, tongue still touching the harp (sounds thin though). Anyway long time ago I have given up to tell people about this technique so it's nice to finally see that someone else has the same embouchure!
I switch between TB and pucker (like Iceman explained with harp tilted ) continuously, and have also noticed that when puckering I can have several holes open but only get sound from one hole. I can bend a hole with this controlled/aimed stream of airflow, but at the same time also let air pass on the side of the stream, without affecting the pitch of the next hole, and I kind of use this technique to play 2 hole chords, mostly 2 and 3 draw, or 3 and 4 draw, and bend the 3 draw but let the other hole stay unbent. I think I also do shift the angle of the harp from side to side, like Nate describes, when doing this. So yeah, for me it's a useful technique to get those types of 2 hole (sometimes even 3 hole) draw chords with one hole bent.
The harp is far enough into my mouth that I start running out of room for my finger along the back.
Yup . . . I find myself playing like this as well. Tripped across it accidentally while trying to improve my warbles (one of my biggest challenges due to an old neck injury). After many months of practice and experimentation I finally found a winning combination (for me) between head shake and horizontal hand movement. But, I tried your back-and-forth tilting method and found I can do that slowly from the get-go. I can see how it would work.
But the bigger point is that having the harp deep in my mouth allowed me to have a much better tone (I suspect it gives a better seal), have more control on bends, warble more clearly and (maybe most importantly) use much less breath force. I'm not doing any tongue blocking for single notes, and I wouldn't call it a pucker either. I don't really call it anything.
I guess I'm of the "whatever works" school of thought. And, at least for me, the method you describe works the best.
I would add that I didn't think I was tilting the harp (upward) until I began practicing in front of a mirror. I discovered that, even with the harp deep in my mouth, I'm tilting at probably around 20 degrees or so ---------- Marr's Guitars
Over a decade's experience designing, building & playing Cigar Box Guitars
The idea of tilting the harmonica up solves the cover plate shape issue as it compares to how lips actually relax on the harmonica.
The cover plates are designed so top and bottom are identical (aside from the great concept of custom cover plates in which the top one is made with a different type of curve to accommodate this lip issue).
Our lips on the harmonica are not top/bottom equal, so this causes a combination effect that can be a problem - tilting helps remove the problem and gives a more efficient and natural orientation.
Those that are self taught and for years have placed the harmonica straight on no doubt ignored the slight discomfort and forged ahead with a technique that is not the most efficient, but works for them by way of long term habit. These are the folks that find it awkward to change their approach.
Beginners taught to tilt the harmonica up take to it easily are in better position to develop more efficient technique. ---------- The Iceman
I've played with tilting vertically, and I think I do it a tiny bit most of the time. Maybe it's my mustache getting in the way of doing it more extremely. I think it leads into what some people call lip blocking (where you are just blocking with your lower lip). I do that, but I think with me it's more how I sort of hold the harp low relative to my mouth. I would say I put a little pressure on my lower lip... not a lot, but enough so that when I slide the harp back and forth the lower lip follows, kind of like one of those slow motion punch photos. It seems all other things equal I also hold the right end a little higher than the left, although at this point that might just be an affectation from concentrating on how I hold the harp.
Agree that the posts on both sides of the hole effectively triple the width of the opening. I often have to get beginners to relax and stop scrunching their lips into a tiny pinhole that is hard to move air through and causes lip tension.
The tilt I can take or leave. I can play with a relaxed embouchure without tilting. But lots of folks seem to like it.
Joe Filisko sells a translucent plastic shell, sort of like a CX-12 shell that emulates the outer shape of a diatonic harmonica. He calls it a tongue block trainer but it can also be used for non-tongue block embouchures to demonstrate the shaping of your lips on the face of the harmonica:
Nate, if you have 3 holes inside your lips the only possibility is that you are either Tongue- or U-blocking. If the lateral holes weren't blocked in some fashion they would sound.
My mentor Harry Harpoon U-blocks. He curls his tongue so tight that if he sticks it out he can play just fine with the harp not even touching his lips.
PT Gazell describes a "super-tight" focus of his airstream that enables his spot-on bend intonation and lighting-fast runs. I can't reproduce what he says exactly nor do I fully understand it. You'd have to ask him. I don't know how he does that unless it is with his tongue.
Michelle, I'm not tongue blocking or U-blocking. Try the experiment from my first post with the harp out in front of your mouth. You can get just one hole to sound. Then imagine doing that but instead of aiming the air with your lips you are doing it somewhere deep in the back of your mouth. Philosophy's description is dead on. I can, without moving my lips, puff and get more notes. I assume I am doing something with my tongue in the back of my mouth to 'aim' the air, but my tongue is not on the harp.
(It's a very useful technique if you are going to add quick tongue slaps, because you have several holes available, but I hardly ever play full on tongue blocking because I can't get good bends that way (yet))
Winslow, thanks for the link to Filisko's training device. I guess if you can get a clear mouthpiece so you can see what is going on with your embouchure just like a horn player, the harmonica must be a real instrument after all! ;-)
If you put the harp deep in your mouth, drop our jaw, and holes are exposed to the inside..they must sound. Blow or draw. When I pull or push air it is filling the entire area inside my mouth. I think you are lip blocking
Nate. I'm with you. Have been for decades. When no tongue is involved, I'm fully relaxed, and simply playing for playing's sake, I am making single notes and well wider that the comb teeth on either side of the hole. I've always just figured it to be some kind of unconscious airstream focus that occurred through some element of muscle memory borne out of biofeedback. I was slushing along outside of any disciplined and conscious "practice" or intentional playing (maybe I was driving, or drunk or whatever) and I have just assumed that my embouchure developed to focus the air so that it sounded correct to my ear, while still playing loose-lipped. (Or, I could be absolutely off base. It's been know to happen routinely throughout my life, and I'm quite confident that some do-gooder on this Forum will gleefully point that out to me.)
I stand in solidarity with Nate. Nate speaks for me.
(I'm also a brown-noser on a high order)
---------- ~Buzadero Underwater Janitor, Patriot MBH poster since 11Nov2008
Harpdude, nope. I don't have a camera to prove that I'm not, but I'm not. Like I said, you can prove the principle outside of your mouth by blowing on your harp from a couple inches from your face. With a little concentration you can get just one note to sound. Whatever I'm doing is that same idea, only from the back of my mouth.
My tongue is well behind my teeth, seems most of the time I have 3 holes exposed at a time, and by adjusting the back of my throat, without adjusting my lips I can go from playing one note to play 2 or 3.
I know it sounds crazy, and I'd never heard anyone talk about it before. I'm glad I'm not the only one. ---------- Nate Facebook Thread Organizer (A list of all sorts of useful threads)
Hi Nate, I too have experienced similar reed behavior in the past. I'm willing to bet that you are simply tuning the resonance of your mouth (and throat, etc) to the correct resonance frequency of the reed that you actually get to sound, and are possibly also suppressing to some extent the resonance of the surrounding reeds (as we have to do when overblowing). We all know that reeds don't vibrate properly (or in many cases at all!) if your mouth is not tuned to them.
As for getting one hole to sound while blowing at a harp a few inches in front of you, that might just be due to focusing the airflow mostly on one reed with not enough force to get past that barrier to get the others going.
Perhaps also there is some unevenness in the gapping of the reeds. That could contribute to things as well.
Last Edited by yonderwall on Aug 26, 2015 6:24 PM
I would be very surprised if there were airstreams, kind of analogous to ocean currents, inside the oral cavity when playing the harp. The oral cavity is acting like a plenum. I would expect pressure inside the mouth to be pretty consistent in all areas of the mouth. When you blow into the air to create a stream that reaches a harp a couple inches away, you will not significantly affect the ambient air pressure no matter how hard you blow. This allows you to create the pressure differences that are related to the stream. When your mouth is sealed against the harp, the pressure in your mouth can not have the large variations required to create a stream. When you raise the pressure, you up the pressure in your entire mouth. This would be very hard to verify. Even if you got a camera and lights into you mouth, you would need something like smoke in the airstream to be able to see the flow patterns. I agree with younderwall that if the holes adjacent to the sounding hole are uncovered but not sounding, the reason is more likely resonance than airflow. The Filisko tool Winslow pointed to could shed some light on the question of what holes are fully blocked.
Resonance, flow patterns, airstream....it's getting a bit esoteric and out there as far as explanations go.
Simplest ones are usually the correct ones.
I believe it is as I posted above...the area around the hole that is solid creates a larger "hole" so that lips can be quite relaxed and still achieve one note.
As to throatblocking, it may be that bundling effect in which one thinks that control is coming from throat while something else is going on at the same time to create the single note or single note to two notes as described above.
I can not conceive of a way that two or three holes are open and yet only one will sound because of some split in the direction of air flow or pressure. ---------- The Iceman
Yonderwall writes "We all know that reeds don't vibrate properly (or in many cases at all!) if your mouth is not tuned to them."
That's simply not true.
Any harmonica reed will speak readily without mouth tuning. It's only when you tune your mouth that you can - in some instances - affect the behavior of a reed for better or worse.
The basis for getting a good sound out of a harmonica is getting out of the way and letting a neutral airflow (with plenty of mass behind it from your air column) get to the reed, and only tuning your mouth as an alteration to that neutral flow.
Winslow - thank goodness someone's finally said it, and someone with authority here. It's a free-reed instrument, it will sound if you hold it out of the car window. Just because resonance is involved in music doesn't mean it's the answer to every question.
Similarly there's a lot more to the sound of an instrument than just its harmonics.
I'm still coming back to thinking that basically somewhere in the back of my mouth I am doing with my throat and tongue what I am doing with my lips when I isolate one hole with the harmonica away from my face. In fact, I think I have another piece of supporting evidence that suggests it's not a resonance issue. The whole reason I was examining this in the first place was because I do my warbles a little differently. I slide the harmonica back and forth, but my lips go with the covers. I figured that trick out because doing warbles normally was destroying my lips. When I do a warble now the gap between my lips stays essentially the same, but by moving the harp side to side moves the section of those 3 holes I have exposed in front of the air column, and the note changes. I can also do it by moving one end or the other end of the harmonica away/towards my face, which by changing the angle of the harmonica in my mouth changes which hole is getting the wind. From the point of view of sliding the harmonica across my lips it's very minimalist, and I change the notes without changing the shapes inside my mouth.
I've had a hectic last couple days. I'll keep thinking if there is any way to film the phenomena with what I've got around and see if I can't come up with something over the weekend. I do have a clear acrylic comb around here somewhere.
No. I wouldn't expect you to put it in your mouth. If they have an extra long one, they can sneak up behind your teeth and see what's happening with your airflow.... ---------- ~Buzadero Underwater Janitor, Patriot MBH poster since 11Nov2008
I have access to boroscopes and endoscopes that have only been shoved into the guts of printers. Still not sure I want one in my mouth. The idea is not unheard of though. This is done with an endoscope (looks out end of tube) if you used a boroscope (looks out side of tube) it could hang by the uvula and look towards the mouth.
I think I first saw this on this forum.
Last Edited by STME58 on Aug 27, 2015 11:06 PM
I'm sorry, Nate, but I'm just not getting it. I guess I'm too much of a scientist and engineer and my logical thinking is clouding my mind. I'm stuck at STME58's statement about equal air pressure inside the mouth. 8^)
Hi Winslow, I did not mean to imply that one's mouth must be tuned exactly to the frequency of a given reed to get it to play, rather that the tuning of one's mouth can indeed very much influence the way a reed will vibrate, and is something worth considering when trying to explain why reeds may be behaving unexpectedly.
Here's a recent David Barrett blurb discussing this very subject : http://www.bluesharmonica.com/mechanical_resonance_how_tuning_your_mouth_effects_reed
And MindTheGap, in the same vein as above, of course reeds will vibrate when held out of a car window (provided the car is moving fast enough ;) it's when we use our mouths to create resonance chambers that are ill-suited to the playing of a given reed that problems can creep in. I have to disagree with your statement that "there's a lot more to the sound of an instrument than just its harmonics." Harmonics are the single most important aspect of an instrument's sound! They are what make a clarinet sound like a clarinet, a trumpet sound like a trumpet, and a harmonica sound like a harmonica. Without harmonics every note would be nothing more than a pure sine wave, and every instrument would sound like a hearing test in a doctor's office.
IMO, "tuning the mouth to the frequence of a given reed" is nothing more than proper tongue placement.
One can approach it from tongue placement focus (which I teach) as well as from thinking about resonance tuning (which places the tongue in the proper position).
Tongue placement is the easiest and more direct route for learning. ---------- The Iceman
Last Edited by The Iceman on Aug 28, 2015 7:37 AM
@Iceman: re: shape of cover plates "Our lips on the cover plate are not top/bottom equal."
As a dentist, I can say this is mostly correct, but not for everyone. The majority of people who have a normal bite do have lips that are pretty equal top and bottom but as we open our mouths, the lower jaw drops down and back slightly, as Iceman describes when on the harp. Thus tilting the harp helps top lip cover more of cover plate and allows more of the fleshy part of the lower lip to relax and "block" the adjacent holes.
However some people have a protruding jaw shape, often referred to as an underbite, and would likely get the same effect without having to tilt the harmonica as opening would bring the lips in a more even position as the jaw drops down and back.
A third, and more common than underbite, jaw position is the overbite where the upper jaw and lips are forward of the lower jaw. Tilting the harmonica to get onto the lower lip would be tougher and playing with the harmonica flat might necessitate moving the jaw forward, which could be uncomfortable. In It's extreme the lower lip can be behind the front teeth. I doubt many with such a bite would choose, or be able, to play the harmonica (great for reed instruments though!).
It would be interesting to see how many of the forum members fall into each category. It might also explain some of the variances in how they feel they get single notes.
yonderwall - re harmonics, yes of course they are vital in describing sound but just as in speech there are many other things that contribute to the characteristic sound of an instrument e.g. inharmonic partials, transients, non-pitched sounds, envelope of amplitude (attack, sustain, decay and all that) and how the harmonics change over the lifetime of the note. If harmonics where all a note possessed that a draw-bar organ or simple sine-wave combining synth would actually sound like all those orchestral instruments named on the stops. It's well known that people find it much harder to differentiate between instruments when they are played recordings of just a static tone without these other features (like the middle of the note without beginning and end bits) . Key clicks on a B3 organ, the sound of the bow on the string, a plectrum hitting a guitar string. Subjectively it's absolutely clear to me that a lot of the interesting sound of the blues harp in particular (amped or acoustic) comes from the percussive, non-harmonic sounds around the note. E.g the rough edges even on single notes that come from a nice articulation.
And you when bring a pretty tube amp into play, you've got non-linear effects like intermodulation distortion. It's then not about simple harmonics like guitar strings or Pythagoras and his anvils.
And yes, I know that any wave shape can be represented by an infinite series of sine waves (or indeed other orthogonal functions) but it's a complex business to apply that in practice to a complex sound that varies its timbre over time, and has lots of other features, like a piano string. Which is why it's taken a long time to get really good synthesised piano sounds.
Last Edited by MindTheGap on Aug 28, 2015 8:50 AM
And as for resonance, I'm sure it's also vital to good sound production, but it's not the only thing. You can make a harmonica overblow by using a straw. Where's the resonance there? I've not studied it, and it's not my area of expertise, but can't help but think that air-flow effects must be important too. This is never discussed. The fact of the straw-overblow makes me thing immediately that there's a linear-vs-turbulent flow effect somewhere in the mix of the explanation of OB and possibly conventional bends too. Subjectively, when I do a conventional bend, the flow feels different - faster, so lower pressure something like that? Only a guess but maybe flow effects are the cause, and resonance amplifies the result.
Last Edited by MindTheGap on Aug 28, 2015 8:49 AM
Hi MindTheGap, ok, I think that you and I are actually pretty much on the same page regarding harmonics (I was going to hide behind the shield of "technically everything about a note except its attack and decay are harmonics in a Fourier-sense," then I pictured people huddling behind their shields at the end of the movie 300 and thought better of it :)
And yes, resonance and shaping of the harmonic spectrum are all indeed very important in producing the sounds we want, as is airflow. If you haven't see it, a good read can be found here… they actually discuss resonance experiments akin to your straw example: https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/antaki/articles/Bahnson%20JASA%201998.pdf
yonderwall - Nice one, thank you! If it does turn about to be resonance is dominant, I'll be perfectly happy. But a quick scan of the paper suggests it's a mix of airflow and resonance. And that's what it feels like to me. But then, even simple old resonance is complex enough. I'm thinking varnish on violins.
Sorry you were the lightning rod for my rant - but something good has come of it :)
Edit (Subtext was - musical instruments and are wonderfully complex, even an apparently 'simple' one like a harmonica, and it's good to respect that).
Edit Edit (and I've had a difficult time making the harp sound like it should - much better now - so for me it's vital to understand some of the things that are important. A piano note sounds great, built-in to the mechanism, but with the harp you've got to MAKE it do all that stuff, n'est pas?).
Last Edited by MindTheGap on Aug 28, 2015 9:27 AM
Mlefree, to my thinking though when you've got a harp in your mouth you are no longer talking about a balloon where the pressure will equalize so much as a breeze in a hall because the air has an instant path out to equalize the pressure. Think of the back of the mouth like an oscillating fan blowing air around the room of your mouth. :)
There will be enough breeze to move stacks of papers in some places where it's focused, but in other spots maybe just the corners of the stacks go up. Transfer that to reeds and remember reeds, like a stack of paper, have a certain threshold they've got to cross to overcome their lack of motion. I would guess until you apply enough pressure for them to start blocking the slot they don't sound. As long as the focus of the pressure/oscillating fan doesn't give them enough energy to sound the stack of papers/reed sounding doesn't start.
MindTheGap - To Winslow's point, I guess that resonance should only be a major factor when we want it to be, and otherwise we should just keep a wide mouth chamber and "get out of the way" of the air flow. I'll have to reread that article too (I haven't looked at it in a few years).
And yes, musical instruments are frustratingly complex :)
As for Nate's question, and whether we are in the regime of a static bag of air where flows don't matter, or a swirling storm where flows matter - I don't know. But I'd suggest that because the reeds don't offer much resistance and there is a lot of air passing that flows are important. We are always being encourage to breathe through the instrument right? Can you do that with an oboe?
When I was learning to bend, one for the many, many, many bits of advice was to feel the cool air going over the back of your tongue/soft palatte. And when playing the high notes, to use huffy-warm air. So I think flows are important.
But that said, it's not at all clear that flows are the explanation of Nate's ability to switch holes like he does.
Re the point about shakes (lips staying on the harp) I do that too - after a lot of trial and error it was The Iceman's advice to 'work the divider between holes rather than the holes themselves' that gave the answer. It feels to me like the lips are uncovering one side or other of the divider. Be interesting to find out though.
Last Edited by MindTheGap on Aug 29, 2015 3:03 AM
Yes. With STME58's boroscope, a transparent harmonica from one of the clever customisers here and an enthusiastic volunteer - anything must be possible. Newton stuck bits of wood behind his eyeballs to find out what was going on.
I just want to continue my rant about resonance by picking up the comment by Littoral on another thread - he compares the harp to the violin. And I think that nails it as an analogy - the violin strings happily vibrate on their own, but you need to connect them to the body of the violin and the human body with all the available resonating surfaces and chambers to produce a good tone.
Blow into the harp from a few inches and I get a funny little metallic sound, bring it to the mouth and it rounds out into a lovely full note. That's the beauty and mystery of resonance at work.
But it is possible that when I read that paper it will say you need resonance chambers to make the reed vibrate properly in which case I'll take it all back. Until then I'll see blowing into a harp with a hairdyer like plucking a violin string nailed to block of wood, and playing the harp in the mouth like mounting the string on a violin body and clamping it under my chin.
Last Edited by MindTheGap on Aug 29, 2015 9:34 AM
MindThe Gap mentions the Violin, I recently read on the University of New Zealand Music and Physics website, that part of the difference between the squeals of a beginner and the pleasing tones of a violin virtuoso is getting the torsional vibration mode of the string in sync with the longitudinal mode. I find this interesting on a couple levels and it relates to the discussion here. One, I had never even considered the torsional mode of a vibrating string, and two, people have been doing this for centuries without understanding or even caring one whit for the physics!
Not that the physics is useless. In truly blind tests, most musicians prefer the best of today's violins, into which a great deal of the study of the physics of the violin has gone. However, if they get an inkling that one of the instruments is a Stradivarius, they have to prefer that one. (undocumented data I think I heard on the radio :-))
Last Edited by STME58 on Aug 29, 2015 10:02 AM
Nate, like you I discovered that I seemed to be directing the airflow to the correct reed without blocking adjacent holes. I kept experimenting to find out what was happening but to no avail. I came to the conclusion that because of tilting the harp slightly, the sides of my relaxed bottom lip were curling up around the adjacent holes maybe just enough to slightly restrict the airflow, which would be all it takes to sound the intended hole.
Re the violin string - that's amazing. Things always turn out a lot more complex in real life. Shows the danger of applying simple principles to these things.
Archery is just like this. Thousands of years of successfully shooting arrows, using design by rule of thumb and experience. Behind the scenes, some difficult physics and some wild materials science that has was only revealed when high-speed photography came along. Without one bit of really strange behaviour, a bow and arrow wouldn't work at all.
The ancient Greeks thought that arrows travelled in triangular trajectory(well, why not, that's what it looks like) but they still managed to hit things.
So who knows, maybe Nate is right. Get smoking.
BTW, a quick quote from that paper...
In order to play the basic, natural tones of the key of the harp, no special configuration of the vocal tract is typically required. The player simply blows or draws through the appropriate hole. Vibration of the reeds occurs as a result of the interaction of aerodynamic forces acting on the reed and the mechanical properties of the reed itself.
...but it probably gets more complicated later on.
Oh, like all the other things I've read, it seems to describe in detail what the reeds seen to do during bends and overbends, but not explain the cause. 'Further modelling is required.' It does though, if I read it right, suggest where the harmonics come from - a little hesitation when when reed goes through the slot stops it being a simple boring sinusoid.
Maybe the harmonica makers could enhance that glitch to change the harmonics. Maybe a different shaped reed? :) Thicker plates?
Last Edited by MindTheGap on Aug 29, 2015 11:04 AM
