GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Horn-Loaded Speakers
In the Thread: The 5-ways from Germany.

Post Subject: Hornlips?Posted by rowuk on: 7/13/2012

Romy,lips are a very interesting part of the resonant musical instrument.
I did an experiment many years ago by gluing a headphone driver to a mouthpiece and feeding it a sine wave, sawtooth and square wave. With the sawtooth and square wave the sound was very similar to an expressionless dead trumpet - with all of the frequency response however. So, we can play trumpet even without the lips. A speaker is enough to get the standing wave started and the leakage of the standing wave due to impedance mismatch is the same.
When I changed the frequency of the wave going into the horn, the acoustic impedance went WAY up and we lost over 12dB of volume until we got to the next frequency that fit in the partial series!
The lips alone are not sufficient for expression. The relaxed body, big breath of air, well tuned ears and brain, the acoustics of the room, even the presence of an audience all influence expression to a great degree. Without the integration of all those things, we have "musical morons". If we build speakers with lips, we need extra big brains to control them - even only for one note. I think integrating 5-7 speakers is tough enough. Just imagine if you had to tune your system to A=415Hz historic mean tone pitch, A=440Hz for standard 50s/60s/70s well tempered US Orchestra pitch, A=443Hz for modern European pitch and A=445Hz for Vienna pitch. I think that you go CRAZY! Wind instrument players need special optimization (different instruments) to accomodate the different tuning.

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