Flute On Computer
Beverly Friddle
A Virtual Pan Flute produces the sound of a traditional Pan Flute through a computer, tablet or mobile without the presence of the physical instrument. The Pan Flute or panpipes are made up of a series of pipes of different lengths attached together in descending order. The pipes themselves can be made of various materials but are most commonly made of bamboo or other similar plants. Most typical pan pipes are made of 16 pipes arranged in two rows of 8 placed on top of one another. The pipes can be blocked at the ends with a small stone or lump of wax to produce a lower note and to adjust the pitch. Sounds are made by blowing into the pipes to create a vibration and the length of the pipe determines the note produced. In a very basic sense, the pan pipes are a simple type of organ, as the principles of sound production remain the same.
The use of Pan Flutes is common across Europe, Asia and America though it is widely associated with Peru and the Andean region. The Pan Flute is also common in Romania, though the instrument looks slightly different as all the pipes are cut to create an arc formation. The musician Gheorghe Zamfir is the most famous Romanian Pan Flute artist and is also known as the 'Master of the Pan Flute.'
The name pan flute comes from the Greek god Pan. Pan was thought to be the god of nature and he was frequently depicted holding a piped instrument. Though the first appearance of Pan Pipes is not known, the Romans used the instruments at festivals, banquets and at important occasions from the 1st century onwards.
Composer Andrew May is best known for chamber music that combines classical instruments with interactive computer systems. During his childhood in Chicago he studied violin, wrote chamber music for his friends, manhandled tape recorders to make odd sounds, and wrote computer software - but these were all separate activities. Then he learned about interactive computer music, and it turned out they could all work together. These days, May teaches composition and computer music at the University of North Texas, where he directs the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia. He still plays violin, writes chamber music for his friends, and writes computer software - but now, sometimes some of the friends are the software.
Russell Pinkston (b. 1949) currently resides in Austin TX, where he is Professor of Music Composition and Director of Electronic Music Studios at The University of Texas at Austin Butler School of Music. He holds degrees from Dartmouth College (BA 1975) and Columbia University (MA 1979, DMA 1984), where he studied composition with Jon Appleton, Jack Beeson, Mario Davidovsky, George Edwards, and Chou Wen-chung.
*Album cover provided for Editorial use only. Ravello Records LLC. The Ravello Imprint is a registered trademark of PARMA Recordings LLC.
The views and opinions expressed in this media are those of the artist and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views and opinions held by PARMA Recordings LLC and its label imprints, subsidiaries, and affiliates.
So I'm Andrew Botros, former engineer and a former student of the University of New South Wales. I did my undergraduate thesis in computer engineering, although at the School of Physics, which was unusual. I did a music project to build a computer simulation of the flute for the benefit of musicians, not just for intellectual stimulation. That's how I met you, Jane, as the flute player who could give advice and also try things out - so I would have met you in the year 2000.
The Virtual Flute is, easily, the biggest fingering book for the flute known to man. Has never been attempted again in the fourteen years that it's been public. And it's comprehensive in the sense that a computer simulation will go through every possible fingering, of which there are tens of thousands, and make a fairly good prediction of what notes it will play, what multiphonics it can play and also the quality of the notes - being its intonation and timbre.
As time has gone on, it's tended to be of most use to those of the more advanced end of their flute playing - especially those who are particularly good at and have an interest in contemporary music. So The Virtual Flute's been credited in flute compositions, which has been, a great credit to the project itself. So, for example, Richard Barrett, in the past few years has had two compositions where at the footnote of the cover page is, "Thanks to The Virtual Flute", which has been a great compliment. And they have generally been commissioned for, or by, very, very skilled flutists who are interested in contemporary repertoire.
His compositions are the only ones that I know directly because they came up in web searches - I wasn't even informed of them. In fact, if we're speaking freely, one of the great regrets of my recent life is that one of those great compositions was premiered last year in London and I was in London at the time and had no idea and only found out a month later that I could've gone to the world premier of a piece of work dedicated to, in some part, The Virtual Flute.
Every so often I get questions from flutists, composers, and researchers from around the world. Some musicians are quite memorable - I once corresponded with the flutist from a New York "collective of composers and performers" called Anti-Social Music. I bumped into one of the flautists of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and she was not aware of the work but that's OK. Kathleen Gallagher, a Sydney contemporary flautist often uses The Virtual Flute. Robert Dick is certainly aware of it - he wrote the most well-known fingering book in print. So he has been aware of The Virtual Flute since its very start. Compared to printed fingering books, The Virtual Flute is many, many times larger - and interactive.
So The Virtual Flute is built from physical measurements of the instrument. So at the physics lab at the University of New South Wales, very precise measurements of the acoustics of the flute are done. So there would be a machine that would be attached to the embouchure hole of the flute. It would put sound in and then listen to what sound would come out. And these sounds are not all that audible, but they're detected by a machine. But from that, you can tell what is the natural playing frequencies of the instrument from analysing the movement of air at the embouchure hole. So you do this for a number of different fingerings, and then you build up a data set where if you're going to have a go at trying to simulate it, you'd have a place to start. And so the first part of the project (and I spent probably almost the first twelve months doing this) was trying to get from physical principles, a fairly simple model, and trying to reproduce these measurements done in the lab. Once you've done that, you can get the computer to do every single fingering which no one's going to do in a manual way, because there are tens of thousands of those. So that's the first part of it. Then, now that you've got predictions of what the acoustics are like, I wanted to know if a musician would also have the same experience? And so that's where I met you and you stepped in and you would go through a number of fingerings and say which notes and which multiphonics you could play, and I would get the computer to learn using, literally, "learning algorithms", which actually are very widely talked about now in scientific circles and in the public. Machine learning is talked about all the time now. Fifteen years ago it was just a computer interest.
Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence. These days, it's almost the dominant branch. And so once you've got the physical measurements of the flute, and you know what the musician does with their playing, the computer learns how to put one to the next. And then once you've got all that information, you know what can be played, to a certain degree of accuracy, for every fingering. Put them on the web, it's searchable, and that's been The Virtual Flute for a very long time. And it's almost scary to think when The Virtual Flute was launched, Google was only three years old. It's a really interesting thought. But, by chance, the sort of software behind it that would just present the information is the same software that's still used today on the web and would be the same technology behind WordPress and a long list of other systems. So it's interesting how the web has moved and not moved in that time.
So the media coverage didn't come from the flute project itself. It came from the awards that were entered as part of that. So when I graduated, there was an annual prize for final year engineering projects - the big one at the time was the Siemens Prize for Innovation. They don't do it anymore but back then it was a very rich prize, it was a $25,000 prize. It was an Australia wide competition. You got a bit of money if you won the state entry, but that national prize was where it's at. And you were there that day because you were doing the demos as part of that. Once that was won, there was coverage from The Australian, the Daily Telegraph, a number of technical circles as well. The university got interested as well and put their own articles in the local paper, on their own media, etc. So that was my introduction to what the media's like. All that media experience made me think "how do you take a fairly complex project, though an interesting story, and do your very best to get it in the heads of someone who is from the media, and has little attention or time to dedicate to the story"? I'd get practice again, and again, and again on this. And so that was just a brilliant way to hone communication skills in a technical world. When I was doing the project, even in university circles, because it was a collaboration of music, computer science and physics, there was always most of the room who had no idea what I'm talking about. So I was very attuned to this, always, and I'd make no assumptions of what I was going to say and always explain everything from scratch. And that is a wonderful principle to hold on to for the rest of your life in whatever circles you interact with with others. So it was great practice - how do you take unfamiliar things and give it to other people? Even when you're in large organisations, you always think that if you're going to tell how your project is going to the bosses, it's easy to assume that they might just understand it already. Usually they don't. And so was a really good setting for just stepping back and thinking, "my audience needs a bit of background here and I'm going to give it to them - and in a short space of time because they're going to move on to something else very quickly."
64591212e2