hmmm my teacher tells me exactly the same thing. i don't think it relates to the temperature of the air, that doesn't make much sense physically, its more a way of how you open your throat to get the warm air. it is easier to say warm air rather than open throat and explain the differences the diaphragm makes.
well thats what i think anyway, it does make a difference when i play with 'warm air' but i think its more to do with how your throat and diaphragm adapt to make the air, not the air itself
The issue of using lower abdominal muscles to push the air seems also to play a role.
My teacher uses a different concept, she talks about a "round sound" (I am translating from Spanish). But she also insists in the necessity of keeping a stronger support for the air column, based on abdominal pressure. I tend to do this incorrectly, though I am working on it. I had feedback from three different flutists and all agree.
The warm air image seems to be kind of a metaphor, in the sense that air is warm because it comes from lower in the body (or lungs?) and through an open throat. Cool or warm in itself would not be making the noticed difference in sound
"The warm air image seems to be kind of a metaphor, in the sense that air is warm because it comes from lower in the body (or lungs?) and through an open throat. Cool or warm in itself would not be making the noticed difference in sound"
No, The warm air seems warmer when you blow on the palm of the hand.
Try forming the mouth with an larger opening as if saying, : "Haaaah"
and then try blowing a small fast airstream as if you are blowing one of your birthday cake candles out from 4 ft away. You will notice that the faster and smaller airstream feels cooler to the hand. This has to do with humidity in the breath relative to evaporation from the skin. It can be a similar comparison to what they call "Wind Chill" when they report weather. I'm not sure if they concern themselves with this in warmer climates but this measurement is used often around here when the air temperature drops in the winter to alert people of the possibility of frostbite.
It is my opinion that differences in tone come from the size of the airstream, the length of the "windway" (Depth/ thickness of the lips) and air speed. Other factors include the rigidity of the lip muscle around the opening as this can affect the clarity of the air column, since eddys around the perimeter of the air column can influence the sound. Also the direction of the air column relative to the hole, where it comes past the edge and how much of the hole is covered by the lips are important.
I agree that the warm air is indeed warmer that the cool air, when blown towards our hand as in the video. It is warmer and more humid, coming from lower in our lungs and trough an almost wide open mouth and throat. But IMO, the situation is different when we blow into our flutes.
I considered the video as an example (I called it a metaphor, probably a too loose use of the term) but still a good example, because it conveys the right idea and the effects are quite noticeable.
I have been trying it this morning, although today, for some unknown reason, my sound quality is worst as it usually is. But still, I sound better when I think about the warm air issue and consequently prepare my body as if I was blowing it on the hand. But I am not; the quantity of air we blow on the flute is considerably smaller than when blowing openly, otherwise we could not sustain notes over a few seconds.
The warm air in this case resembles in practise more the cool air as it being controlled by the mouth airway. But still, it makes a big difference. Quite interesting for me, as I need to improve, among so many other things the quality of my sound, to make it "warmer"
I could have a flute soloist listen to me some three years ago and he commented that I was doing all the control with the mouth and too litle with the abdominal muscles. He considered the mouth (lips, etc) to be a final or fine adjustment of what is basically a control to be performed with the lower muscles.
I am still struggling to put this comment in practise.
Hi Jose,
"I agree that the warm air is indeed warmer that the cool air, when blown towards our hand as in the video. It is warmer and more humid, coming from lower in our lungs and trough an almost wide open mouth and throat. But IMO, the situation is different when we blow into our flutes."
I don't think that what I was saying is that "warmer air" when we refer to air speed has any difference in temp. . It has to do with perception. Her concern is generally that we can't necessarily control our tone simply by closing our lips. If the lips are less closed, then we can play a sound with less forced breath support(Warm air).
The underlying issue with all of this is that an experienced player is using muscles which are more under control and in better muscle tone. Consequently, describing how and how much is very difficult to do for another person. So, one impostant aspect is to try to understand what is said and at the same time focus your ears on the tone quality that is being produced because you want to find a way to imitate that. ANd doing that is very difficult with even the best recording devices as sound is simply altered in a recording.
"I could have a flute soloist listen to me some three years ago and he commented that I was doing all the control with the mouth and too litle with the abdominal muscles. He considered the mouth (lips, etc) to be a final or fine adjustment of what is basically a control to be performed with the lower muscles.
"
Again, I would not necessarily take this sort of comment too literally. Firstly, there is a certain amount of consistency that a player needs to obtain and maintain. This is in regards to breath support amount and also embouchure control. IF you learn to control the shape of the opening as I described as well as your breath support, then you will control your tone better. If your tone is more shrill with less core, try opening your jaw more so that it will increase your mouth cavity like a bass singer singing "Oh" on a very low note. St the same time trying to keep your lips closed, should give your lips more of a taller opening. Remember also that a person needs to do a certain amount of tone work daily to develop and maintain the sound quality on each of the notes of the flute. This is basically what Boehm and Moyse suggested (to name only tow great players of the past). Quantz referred to a proper flute tone as like a "Contralto" but his flute was wood and he may have been reaching for a darker tone core. So also, The German Umlaut as if one were saying Boehm or Flute are somewhat of a model for emouchure.
One of the ways that tone is taught is to practice certain slower pieces along with a daily routine of the whole range of the flute.
Moyse collected a book of fine tunes to use for this entitled: "Tone Development
through Interpretation"
Yes, warm air is when there is no (or much reduced) chill factor against a moist hand, and when there is a significant reduction in pressure of the air after it passes the lips.
Personally I think the warm/cold air stuff is a load of nonsense when it is applied to flute playing...
To demonstrate warm air, she opened he mouth wide. It is impossible to play a flute like that. Now blow into your palm with a flute embouchure. To get warm air on your palm you have to either blow so gently that n o sound will come form your flute, or you have to blow with a lip aperture so large that you would run out of air within a few seconds.
But if these sorts of hot/cold images actually induce players to do the unrelated things that make a better sound, then good for them. Clearly some minds respond better to imagery of some sort, in preference to an analytical understanding, but if you are a teacher, be aware that this sort of imagery may mean absolutely nothing to a student with a more science-based mind.
For me personally, I would prefer to have been taught that for any given note, there is only a certain range of air pressures from the lungs that will produce that note at a certain volume. Altering that pressure within those limits, and making appropriate adjustments to embouchure to maintain pitch, can alter the timbre of the note.
Another image she has that I find to be nonsense is that warm air comes from lower in the body. Not so. The only properties that the air has as it enters the mouth cavity is pressure and speed. But the speed is a function of the pressure and the lip aperture. So that leaves pressure.
The pressure comes form the abdominal muscles and the intercostal muscles. It has nothing to do with how high in the body the player imagines to be the active source of that pressure.
Another common nonsense image often used by flute teachers is "pushing" or "support" from the diaphragm. The diaphragm cannot and does not support. The intercostals and abdominal muscles do that. The diaphragm is active only for inhalation. But again, these images seem to make a difference to some players by being associated with some appropriate but probably unconscious response.
Hi Micron, you have no argument from me on these things.
I think that the problem is with conveying these messages to others and all that I can say is that more often, some defunct "great teacher" began this habit and it was passed on down until it is a common misconception.
Some others:
"Tone colors". Why do we cross-associate our senses? Sound has no color no more than does it have smell. No more than a color can be "LOUD!"...or soft.
Another common misconception is that the printed manuscript is what we call music. It really isn't music. It is only a means of communication. and not always a very good one at that. As an example: Fake books are often a bare skeleton of what the pieces are about. Trying to learn to perform from a fake book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_book without knowing the sound of the piece is often a bad way to learn the common concept of a piece. So, music is only the sound that is produced. As a comparison, (Without debating the quality) most all pop stars and "performers" go on stage and perform without using any written notation whatsoever. Only "classical musician types" will often use written notation to perform music.
The ones that learn to memorize music well will always have an advantage as musicians.
I totally agree about the tone colours. That never communicated anything to me. I wonder just what proportion of students have a secret response,"What the .... is she trying to say" when the teacher first rattles on about colour and other sensory words. Gradually the student may come to make some association re what the teacher means, but as an initial communication, I think it is useless. They would do just as well to call the aimed-for sound somsething meaningless such as "krach", and gradually, with more use and demonstrations, the hapless student may develop the same association.
Re the sheet-music as notation... A favourite of mine when I was teaching was to give the student an aria such as Mozart's Voi Che Sapete to play. When they thought they could play it, I would then give them a recording of a top soprano singing it, and get them to practice to sing it on their flute like that.
Metaphoric speech is a language trick and it is quite effective, though not always. There are many things around us that cannot be described easily, so we turn to analogies and -sometimes- far-fetched similarities.
When it comes to describe a sound, in practise we can only use metaphors. To give just one example, we may say that sound can be brilliant or dull (attributes more related to light and its effects), and so on. There technical ways to exactly describe or define an specific sound, but they are not at all practical and are only reserved to experts.
I think that metaphors (usually) work because we share a common culture and (preferably) the same language. There is an important part of explicit or unspoken conventions when using metaphoric language and so it is true that it may, or it may not convey the idea, depending on the person who receives it and the quality of the image that the generator is using.
I found the idea of "warm air" useful, if not exact. I believe Nina wants to explain that we should open our airways from the lowest up to the final part of it (we still have to use the embouchure to get the sounds) pushing from down and supporting the air column, etc. Pushing is more applicable to our abdominal muscles but "supporting" is metaphoric, as we are speaking of air. But we normally accept this last image without much problem.
So I endorse metaphoric speaking and I appreciate it a lot.
Using this concept, I have just discovered my own definition of poetry. We challenged ourselves to define poetry in our literature workshop. I could find a few definitions, but none was exact or complete. Poetry seems to always escape a definition and seems more related to a state of the spirit than to a rational definition. In this sense, it could hardly be defined with words.
But I have now found this one: "Poetry is everything written (or spoken) in words, but that sounds musical"
"...Nina wants to explain that we should open our airways from the lowest up to the final part of it..."
You mean keeping throat, soft palate, and tongue as open as possible? (I don't think there are any other voluntarily constrictable parts.) I find a yawn to be a better image.
The warm image may work for you, but isn't it ironic that I can still blow warm air into my palm with an almost completely blocked throat? ... I can blow cold air with airways almost completely blocked?
For me, the warm air image has nothing to do with what is important with flute playing.
As for describing sound/tone. If a teacher uses sensory words, then he/she should demonstrate by examples of their own playing, excusably what they mean. Until that occurs, little communication takes place at the time.
I recall one of my teachers demonstrating a brighter sound, and all I picked up was an increase in volume, which is a totally different parameter. A lot of these shades of tone are probably in the mind of the player.
What did help me in tone changes was the singing teacher who said that the difference between a tenor tone and bass tone was similar to the difference between the violin and cello tone. A big difference is in the mass of the strings. So a singer with thicker vocal chords had a better tone for bass.
I applied this to flute playing. Our equivalent to vocal chords and strings is our airstream, which acts as a reed...
We can adjust its thickness with our embouchure (with corresponding changes in air pressure form the lungs in order to maintain the right pitch and volume).
To me, this concept is a far better one to teach students relatively meaningless images. I.e. tell them what to do to get the different tone effects.
Poetry definition? It's OK, but poetry is different things to different people. "Telling something succinctly form a different perspective" could be poetry without being "musical" ..... whatever "musical" means! Does "musical" mean "poetic sounds"? LOL!
I believe we agree basically in all aspects, though putting some concepts in words that convey the right idea can be very difficult in some cases.
When I saw Nina's video I tried immediately her technique and I noticed a good, positive difference in my tone. So it works for me.
She also demonstrates, (though virtually on a video) how she sounds with the technique.
But these kind of demos or examples are very limited and are of course clearer and more evident when the teacher/performer is with the student in a room. (nice for teachers, otherwise their jobs would be in great risk).
That is, there is nothing that can replace the person-to-person transmission of knowledge, particularly when the concepts are so difficult to describe and more, if we decide to voluntary restrict the use of metaphors.
"You mean keeping throat, soft palate, and tongue as open as possible? (I don't think there are any other voluntarily constrictable parts.) I find a yawn to be a better image."
Yawning is a very good image, though I think it's partial: in my sing lessons I was told hundreds of times that the correct technique for the mouth cavity is close to that of yawning. Only that the warm air thing includes the lower airways, at least as I understand it.
"As for describing sound/tone. If a teacher uses sensory words, then he/she should demonstrate by examples of their own playing, excusably what they mean. Until that occurs, little communication takes place at the time."
I agree, that is the way normal lessons should go and it do, in the case of my teacher. The problem is with new Media, as are Youtube videos and similar. They are limited, but sometimes they can be useful anyway.
"I recall one of my teachers demonstrating a brighter sound, and all I picked up was an increase in volume, which is a totally different parameter. A lot of these shades of tone are probably in the mind of the player."
They certainly are. The definition of a sound using metaphoric images is imperfect and personal. But there are no other way I know of, short of teaching/learning with an audio spectrum analyzer and a bunch of other laboratory instruments. (Anyway, could it be a good idea? Why not?)
"A big difference is in the mass of the strings. So a singer with thicker vocal chords had a better tone for bass."
I am not sure whether this is 100% correct. As I said, I have learnt sing for a few years and there is a *lot* of technique to be learnt in order to sing as a Tenor, a Baritone or a Bass.
There could be some physiological differences between say, a Bass and a male Sopranist, to put extremes, but this is not clear IMO.
When a sing teacher tries your voice, he/she will listen at the lowest and highest notes range you can achieve at that moment and with the technique (or lack of it) you have then. But this range is not fixed and will develop in the right direction while you progress in the learning.
If you are considered a tenor, a good deal of the work will be in the higher range, as you should attain at least a good high B to sing anything serious. For baritones, it seems that the "Timbre" of the voice at the lower range (and not so much the lowest note attainable) is the important thing. I wanted to sing baritone (I thought it was easier), but my second teacher would not allow me because of the Timbre. Has it to do with the vocal strings thickness, or more with their length, or is perhaps, the body cavities good management more important?
I think nobody knows for sure. There is very little science in singing technique (though there are hundreds of books about it), but heaps of technique, all practical and with almost no supporting credible theory behind.
Many theories are contradictory, even opposite. For example, the well known issue of "resonating the sound in your upper sinuses". My second teacher (a male Alto) believed that there is no resonance possible (from the technical point of view), because these sinuses are normally covered with body secretions (mucus) and do not resonate at all.
In summary, singing is a sort of a Magic art. It works, but nobody knows why.
"Poetry definition? It's OK, but poetry is different things to different people. "Telling something succinctly form a different perspective" could be poetry without being "musical" ..... whatever "musical" means! Does "musical" mean "poetic sounds"? LOL!"
Very good question! My answer would be Oh, Yes! At least in the effects that musical things impress on our mind (I would rather say "spirit!", but I am too positivist).
In fact this would be bring us to a new debate: What is the definition of "Music"?
Yawning is a very good image, ..... Only that the warm air thing includes the lower airways, at least as I understand it.
I'm no expert, but I don't think we have voluntary control of the cross section of the lower airways, for any given air pressure within those airways. Furthermore, with the rather slow airflow in flute playing, I don't think it is possible that that cross section could possibly make any difference to playing. As I keep saying, the only property the air can have as it enters the mouth is pressure. No other magical properties. Barring severe asthma-like conditions, constriction further down doesn't make a difference top that pressure. I fairly familiar with this, having permanent damage to my small airways, probably from a childhood infection.
But if you have images that something is happening, that improves your playing, no doubt the mind will make sure you play better, by whatever means, probably that you are not aware of.
I am not sure whether this is 100% correct. As I said, I have learnt sing for a few years and there is a *lot* of technique to be learnt in order to sing as a Tenor, a Baritone or a Bass.
Indeed. Same for the cello and violin player.
When a sing teacher tries your voice, he/she will listen at the lowest and highest notes range you can achieve at that moment and with the technique (or lack of it) you have then. But this range is not fixed and will develop in the right direction while you progress in the learning.
Indeed, as you learn to most appropriately use the thickness and size etc of the vocal chords you happen to have, and other parameters as well.
BTW, as a baritone I certainly sing bass a lot better when my vocal chords are given higher mass by inflammation &/or mucus.
If you are considered a tenor, a good deal of the work will be in the higher range, as you should attain at least a good high B to sing anything serious. For baritones, it seems that the "Timbre" of the voice at the lower range (and not so much the lowest note attainable) is the important thing. I wanted to sing baritone (I thought it was easier), but my second teacher would not allow me because of the Timbre. Has it to do with the vocal strings thickness, or more with their length, or is perhaps, the body cavities good management more important?
Just as with piano and violin strings strings, for any note there is an ideal sting mass and string length for a given desired tone. Of course piano achieves that better than violin. The mass per length (size for vocal chords) drastically alters the tone of a note. Just as the diameter of a wind instrument affects the tone.(compare French Horn with tuba; sax with oboe.)
I think nobody knows for sure. There is very little science in singing technique
That is not what I have experienced. Around here, where we have a good share of world class singing teachers, it seems the better the teacher, the more science they are aware of and include in their teaching. I've sung under a few of these, and there was a lot of science.
Many theories are contradictory, even opposite. For example, the well known issue of "resonating the sound in your upper sinuses". My second teacher (a male Alto) believed that there is no resonance possible (from the technical point of view), because these sinuses are normally covered with body secretions (mucus) and do not resonate at all.
WE get the same with flute teachers who claim there is resonance occurring in the mouth cavity. It is definitely true of reed players, because the reed is inside the mouth, but for flute players where the reed is significantly outside the body, with a minute hole leading to the mouth cavity ... Hmmm. Imagine standing outside a cave (lined with pretty soft, sound-deadening material) with a very, very small entrance. You call out? You will not expect an echo! That is surely because there is no significant connection that can excite a resonance. Same with flute. And probably the same with sinuses. What is blamed on sinuses is probably more to do with the passage from the throat through the nostrils, and the interferences there from mucus etc.
summary, singing is a sort of a Magic art. It works, but nobody knows why.
Sorry, I beg to differ. The more the artist understands his techniques - why they work (or don't work)- the better he paints. That is science.
In fact this would be bring us to a new debate: What is the definition of "Music"?
Sounds that at least one person finds attractive. My children's voices are music to my ears. The sound of a chainsaw, or screaming on stage, could be music to somebody else.
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