The flute-fingering thread made me think of this:

Without actually measuring them you can see that a soprano recorder looks about half as long as a flute, which means it ought to sound about an octave higher, as it officially it does. I remember reading somewhere many years ago (and I've lost the source, unfortunately) that there is some disagreement or at least confusion about what octave a recorder actually sounds though.

If you have both a soprano recorder and a flute at hand you can try the following experiment and report your results here. I didn't have a flute at a hand, so I used a simulation, a flute sample, that is. One problem with my approach is that I don't know how many separate recordings were involved or how they were tweaked.

My ear told me that the recorder’s low C is an octave higher than the flute simulation’s low C and, paradoxically, an octave lower than the flute simulation’s second C--and I think I know what’s happening here. I could hear plainly that the recorder’s low C has virtually no second harmonic content and that it gradually acquires more as the recorder ascends. By the time it gets to Phoenix, I mean A, the second harmonic is fairly prominent. (The plastic recorder jumps here--from G to A--, but the wooden recorder's gradient is smoother.) The flute simulation does more or less the same thing, and its second C second harmonic predominates. It seems to me unrealistic to suppose that just because we habitually consign pitch and timbre to separate conceptual categories the one never impinges on the other. At some point this distinction has to break down.