Category: Science/Technology

Stratos Embouchure Trainer

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Here’s something interesting I recently came across. The Stratos embouchure trainer. It purports to to help you, “adapt your embouchure to get the best from your newly-adjusted jaw position.” Here’s the inventor, trombonist Marcus Reynolds, explaining it.

I have to admit going into the video that I was a little skeptical of the claims right off. Early on he makes a statement that the Stratos will eliminate a “red ring,” but a red ring in and of itself is a meaningless indicator of how much or little pressure a player is using. There’s too much individual variation here, but for some reason this myth is prevalent. He also discusses air stream direction as a matter of jaw alignment, which probably does have some influence, albeit a minor one. Air stream direction is dependent on the lip ratio inside the mouthpiece and you can have downstream players with a jaw position forward, like Reynolds is advocating, or upstream players with a receded jaw position.

My next point of contention is Reynolds apparent endorsement that getting the jaw forward and the horn angle up is best for everyone. It’s true that this is common, but not universal. Personally, trying to raise my horn angle and get my jaw position forwards has had very poor results, I simply play better with a receded jaw and a lowered horn angle. Not having tried out the Stratos, I can’t say that my results trying this would be the same or different, but I’ve taught too many other students and seen other players who also play best with a lowered horn angle to think that a Stratos would be helpful for these players.

However, there are a lot of players who would do better with the jaw position and horn angle that the Stratos apparently encourages. For these players, this device might be a very helpful practice aid. Since it’s adjustable, it might even be possible to alter the angle of it and use it for correctional procedures with players who don’t want their jaw position aligned. I don’t think it’s the panacea that Reynold’s seems to think it is, but it’s an interesting idea and it’s worth a closer look later.

An Examination of the Anatomical and Technical Arguments Against Placing the Mouthpiece on the Vermillion

~ wilktone ~ 1 Comment

While placing the mouthpiece on the vermillion of the lips is commonly described by brass teachers as inherently damaging to the player’s lips or limiting to the player’s technique, the rational for these arguments lacks sufficient evidence to support this opinion. A review of the medical research found no specific evidence supporting the contention that the vermillion is incapable of withstanding the mouthpiece pressure applied by typical brass playing and found some evidence to the contrary. The music literature related to embouchure technique shows some support for the argument that rim contact on the upper lip will limit the vibrations of the top lip, however this position fails to take into account the differences between upstream and downstream brass embouchure technique.

To determine if an aural effect caused by mouthpiece placement on the vermillion could be noted a survey was conducted asking participants to listen to short sound clips of six professional trumpet players and guess whether the player placed the mouthpiece with significant rim contact on the vermillion. The 98 participants scored an average accuracy rate of 51.9%, suggesting that there is no noticeable aural difference between placing the mouthpiece on the vermillion or not.

It was noted that the lack of sufficient collaboration between the medical and musical fields has hindered research in the area of injuries and other medical issues caused by brass playing. Medical experts typically have an insufficient background in brass technique to understand how improper playing mechanics may contribute to injuries. Musical experts frequently make incorrect statements regarding the anatomy of the lips and often demonstrate limited understanding of how anatomical features affect individual player’s embouchure form and function.

Here is the full paper.

Testing for Congenital Amusia

~ wilktone ~ 2 Comments

Jake Mandell is a resident at Brigam and Women’s Hospital and a musician. He developed a test that you can take online to test for congenital amusia, more commonly known as tone deafness. Try it out and see how you do.

It’s purposefully designed to be pretty tough to do. I scored 86.1%, which he lists as “very good performance.” Want to brag or commiserate about your score? Leave it in the comments.

Helium and Pitch

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Do you know why brass and woodwinds go sharp as the instruments get warmed up? It’s common for people to respond that it’s because as the temperature goes up objects expand (true), but if you think this through carefully you’ll realize that this would cause the opposite. The actual effect of the expansion of the instrument due to the temperature increase is pretty negligible, there’s another more dramatic effect that pulls the pitch in the opposite direction. Sound travels faster in a warmer temperature making the pitch go higher.

Many years ago I took a Brass Pedagogy class over to the Physics Department and we did some informal experiments filling up our instruments with helium and trying to play this way. Because sound travels dramatically faster in helium the pitch was quite a bit higher pitched. The woodwind and vocal students in my class had a lot of trouble playing a brass instrument this way, the brass majors found it a little easier. Trying it out myself I found it odd to feel the pitch I was playing but hearing a higher pitch but was able to ignore it and play a steady pitch. This suggested to me that the more experienced the brass player the more “muscle memory” they use to help them play with accuracy.

Here’s a video that demonstrates the same experiment filling up instruments and lungs with helium and showing the humorous results.

Playing on the Red Blindfold Test

~ wilktone ~ 12 Comments

A while back I wrote a post debunking the logic of why many teachers and players incorrectly argue against allowing brass players to place the mouthpiece on the red of their lip. Going through these common points I’ve come to the conclusion that while placing the mouthpiece so there is a lot of rim contact on the upper or lower lip doesn’t work for everyone, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this placement, which is why I titled that post “Playing On the Red Is Fine (as long as it fits your anatomy).”

Recently one of the authors I quoted in that article, Frank Gabriel Campos, posted a couple of responses. In one of his replies he wrote:

In a blind audition, I can easily tell within a minute that someone is playing on the red.

To be honest, I doubt that anyone can really tell by sound alone if a player is placing on the red. This also reminded me of how some players and teachers who are familiar with embouchure types sometimes claim that they can tell which embouchure type a player is simply by hearing a recording. So with this thought in mind, I’ve put together an informal quiz to see how many people can actually tell.

Listen to these 6 audio clips. All 6 players are professional trumpet players with advanced degrees. 5 of the 6 players are college trumpet teachers. Three specialize in classical trumpet and 3 specialize in jazz trumpet, although some do cross over. At least one of these players places the mouthpiece so that rim contacts with the red of the lip and at least one player does not.

(Note: The quiz plugin I’m using seems to be a little buggy, but hopefully it will allow you to see how you did at the end as well as let you know which embouchure type each player belongs to.)

Player A

Player B

Player C

Player D

Player E

Player F

How did you do? Please leave your comments below, but don’t give away any answers to those who haven’t tried the test yet. If you want to see video of the players in the audio samples check it out here (no cheating and watching it first!).

Update – January 25, 2022

It’s been 10 years since I collected data for this survey. Over that time the plugin I used to collect answers is no longer updated and available for WordPress, so you can’t take the test that way. I also lost the original post for the link just above, so I recreated it and wrote some additional thoughts and updated the link.

Vocal Cords Up Close While Singing

~ wilktone ~ 1 Comment

Here’s a neat video I recently came across. It shows the vocal folds of four singers simultaneously while performing Hear Us and Have Mercy. I’m not sure who the composer is. Beautiful piece, though, and well performing – especially considering they had a scope down their noses while singing.

There are many similar videos up on YouTube that show the vocal folds while a musician is performing, not just singers. Here’s one of an oboist who was having voice problems because she was closing her vocal cords while playing.

It would be interesting to look at brass players while performing. I would suspect that the more experienced players would have a very open voice box while playing, or at least this is what we tend to teach. That said, no one has actually looked to see if experienced brass musicians actually do this or not. What we think we do doesn’t always reflect reality.

Shattering a Wine Glass with a Trumpet

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Since I recently posted some YouTube videos on the acoustics of the trumpet I thought I’d also share another video by trumpet player and physics teacher Nick Drozdoff shattering a wine glass with his trumpet.

Pretty cool. Not too high a pitch that I couldn’t also try that on my trombone.

As an aside, I took trumpet lessons from Nick back in *mumble* when I was in high school. He’s a terrific teacher and trumpet player.

Trumpet Physics Masterclasses

~ wilktone ~ 2 Comments

Professor John Harbaugh of Central Washington University has a couple of videos up on YouTube of a trumpet master class. I liked his demonstration using a glass tube and a torch to produce a sound, although the discussion of physics are actually pretty light. Here are the two parts.

Personally, I think that he makes too much about the sympathetic vibrations of the lips to have the lips “relaxed” so that you’re not “fighting the horn.” He’s really discussing playing sensations there, which are notoriously difficult to pin down universally. Some players may benefit from thinking of their lips being relaxed, but others will want to work more on firming the lips. His isometric physics demonstration is a red herring, as I don’t see how it directly relates to the brass embouchure. Squeezing your fingers together for a long time is tiring, of course, but so is playing a brass instrument for long periods of time. If you’ve built the strength and endurance to do this, I feel that it is better to actively firm the embouchure formation (at the mouth corners, primarily) rather than focusing on “kinesthetic response.”

Ultimately Harbaugh wants to advocate a “subconscious or intuitive way of playing,” but the acoustical principles he discusses don’t support this argument. Again, this is a red herring because the point of doing any analysis (embouchure or acoustics or whatever) is to do the active thinking about it while drilling so that you can be intuitive later when it counts. It’s not an either/or issue, just do the proper thing at the proper time. In the practice room you can afford to think about how your are playing and whether your mechanics are correct. On the stage you must concentrate on making good music (which you must also practice doing too).

A much better discussion of trumpet physics (in my opinion) is by Nick Drozdoff, who is not only a very fine trumpet player but also a high school physics teacher.

All Songs Considered On Owning Music

~ wilktone ~ 3 Comments

Emily White, an intern for NPR’s All Songs Consider, has sparked some controversy with her blog post I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With.

I am an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. I’ve only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.

Like White, I tend to get my music as downloads these days, rather than physical CDs. Unlike White, I actually purchase that music. She seems to miss one of the points about purchasing music and thinks that when you download it through file sharing, that’s bad, but copying a physical CD you don’t own is just fine.

During my first semester at college, my music library more than tripled. I spent hours sitting on the floor of my college radio station, ripping music onto my laptop. The walls were lined with hundreds of albums sent by promo companies and labels to our station over the years.

David Lowery has a very thorough response.  The online debate continues at All Songs Considered.

Trombonist’s Muscle Activity Studied Through Thermography

~ wilktone ~ 1 Comment

I’ve blogged about research conducted by Dr. Matthias Bertsch before.  He wrote a paper called Visualization of Trumpet Players’ Warm Up By Infrared Thermography that looked at how embouchure muscles got used by trumpet players at a different ability levels.  He’s more recently replicated this idea and applied it to the entire bodies of a violinist, saxophonist, and trombonist.  Here’s the trombonist’s video.

It’s neat to see which parts of this trombonist’s body heat up most after the warmup and playing for 80 minutes.  Her slide hand get’s dark red in the thermographic view, which doesn’t surprise me.  I was a little surprised that both arms and shoulders seemed to work about as much and showed similar heat patterns.  Thinking more about this, it is a good demonstration of the importance of the left hand grip for trombonists (and probably for trumpet players as well, I’m curious to see similar research done on a horn player regarding the left and right hand positions).

Her hot spots on her face were a little different from what I expected, but not too much.  Comparing it to the photographs in Bertsch’s trumpet study you can see that most players seem to do a lot of their embouchure work at their mouth corners.  With the trombonist you can see that it looks as if one mouth corner is working a bit harder than the other.  There was also a great deal of dark red from the middle of her forehead down to her nose, and not in ways that really resemble the experienced trumpet player in Bertsch’s earlier study.  It might be this particular trombonist isn’t so experienced (the less experienced players in the trumpet study showed a more asymmetrical pattern of warm regions).  Or possibly that more research is needed to see if the trumpet player’s patterns from earlier can be applied to all players in general.

I find it promising that while this sort of research has been used for athletic training for a long time, it is only fairly recently that researchers like Bertsch have been taking a scientific look to the biomechanics of musical performance. It will be interesting to see where the thermographic technology takes brass pedagogy when the technology becomes cheaper, easier to work with, and others begin to utilize it.