Flute: El Salvador musical instrument

The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike woodwind musical instruments with reeds, the flute is an aerophone or reedless wind musical instrument that manufactures its sound from the flow of air across an opening. According to the classification of instrument of Hornbostel Sachs, the musical instrument is categorized as an edge-blown aerophone.

source: interstatemusic.com

A musician that performs the musical instrument can be called a flute player, a flutist or a flautist. The term flutenist that is found in the English up to 18^th century is no more used to refer to the player of this musical instrument.

Apart from the voice of the voice, the musical instrument is the earliest known musical instrument. A number of flutes that was traced back to about 43,000 to 35,000 years ago have been found in the Swabian Alb province of Germany. These musical instruments demonstrate that a developed musical tradition existed from the earliest era of the modern human presence in Europe.

The word flute first entered the language of English during the Middle English era, as floute, or else flowte, perhaps from the old French flaute and from the old Provencal flaut. Attempt to trace the name back to a Latin root have been said to be ‘phonologically impossible. The first known use of the word was in the 14^th century.

The oldest flute was found may be a fragment of the fermur of a juvenile cave bear, with two to four holes discovered at Divie babe in Slovenia and dated back to about 43,000 years from now. Meanwhile, this has been argued. In 2008, another version of the musical instrument that was assumed to have dated back to about 35,000 years ago was found in Hohle Fels cavenear Ulm, Germany. The five-holed version of the musical instrument has a V-shaped mouthpiece and is manufactured from a wing bone of a vulture. The researchers involved in the discovery of the instrument officially published their findings in the journals nature in the year 2009. The discovery was the oldest confirmed of any musical instrument in the history of music, until a re-dating of the flutes discovered in Geißenklösterle cave showed them to be even older with an age of 42,000 years to 43,000 years.

The flute, one of many discovered, was discovered in the Hohle fels caven next to the Venus of Hohle Fels and a short distance from the ancient human carving. On announcing the discovery of the instrument, scientists proposed that the “finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe”.

 A three-holed version of the musical instrument, 18.7 cm long manufactured from a mammoth tusk was found in the southern German Swabian Alb and dated back to about 30,000 to 37,000 years ago in 2004, and two flutes produced from swan bones excavated earlier are among the oldest known musical instrument to have existed.

A playable gudi that is about 9,000 years old was excavated from a tomb in Jiahu together with 29 defunct twins, produced from the wing bones of red-crowned cranes with 6 to 8 finger holes each, in the central chinese region of Henan. The earliest known Chinese flute is the Chi flute that was found in the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng at the Suizhou site, Hubei region, China. The musical instrument dates from 433 BC of the later Zhou dynasty. The musical instrument is fashioned of Lacquered bamboo with closed extremes and 5 stops that are at the side of the flute, rather than of the top of the flute.

The earliest written reference to flute is from a Sumerian language cuneiform tablet that was traced back to about 2600 BCE to 2700 BCE. The flutes are called in a recently translated tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is an epic poem whose development spanned the era of nearly 2100 BCE to 600 BCE.

In genesis 4:21 of the Bible, cites Jubal as being the ‘father of all those who perform the ugab and the kinnor’. The former term from Hebrew that is believed to refer to some wind musical instruments, the latter to a stringed musical instrument, or stringed musical instruments in common. For that, the Jubal is seen in the Judeo-Christian tradition as the fabricator of the flute. Some earliest versions of the musical instrument were manufactured out of shin bones. The instrument has also always been an important part of Indian culture and mythology, and the cross flute believed by many accounts to originate in India as the Indian literature from 1500 BCE has made unclear reference to the musical instrument.

The flute can manufacture sound when a stream of air that is directed across the hole in the musical instrument produces vibration of air at the holes on the musical instrument. The air stream across the hole produces a Bernoulli or siphon. This excites the air that is contained in the normally cylindrical resonant cavity within the musical instrument. The player of the musical instrument alters the pitch of the sound manufactured by opening and closing the holes in the body of the musical instrument, thus altering the effective length of the instrument’s resonator and its corresponding resonant frequency. By differing the air pressure, the player of the musical instrument can alter the putch of a note by causing the air in the flute to resonate at a harmonic instead of the fundamental frequency without opening or closing the holes of the musical instrument.

To be louder, the musical instrument must use a larger resonator, a larger air stream or increased air stream velocity. The volume of a flute can commonly be increased by making the resonator of the musical instrument and the holes of the instrument bigger. This is the reason why the police whistle, which is a form of flute, is very wide for its pitch, and why a pipe organ can be far louder than a concert flute. A larger organ pipe can be made up of many cubic feet of air and the tone hole could be many inches wide, while the air stream of a concert flute measures a fraction of an inch across. The air stream of the musical instrument must be directed at the right angle and velocity, if not the air in the flute will not vibrate. In ducted flutes, a precisely formed and positioned wind way will pad and channel the air to the labium ramp edge across the open window on the musical instrument. In the pipe organ instrument, the air is supplied to the instrument by a regulated blower. In non-ducted flutes, the air stream is compressed and directed by the lips of the player, known as the embouchure. This permits the player of the instrument a wide range of expression in pitch, volume and tone quality, specifically in comparison to the ducted versions of the musical instrument.

Generally, the tone quality of the musical instrument differs because the instrument can manufacture harmonics in different proportions or intensities. The timbre of the instrument can be modified by altering the internal shape of the bore like the conical taper, or the diameter-to-length ratio. Head joint geometry shows up especially critical to acoustic performance and tone, but there is no clear consensus on a specific shape among producers of the instrument.

In its most natural form, a flute can be an open tube that is blown like a bottle. There are many broad classes of flutes. With most versions of the musical instrument, the players of the musical instrument blow across the edge of the mouthpiece, with ¼ of the down lip covering the hole of the instrument. Meanwhile, some version of the musical instrument like the whistle, gemshorn, flageolet, recorder, tin whistle, fujara, ocarina and tonette have a duct, which channels the air onto the edge. These are known as ducted flutes or fipple flutes. The fipple gives the musical instrument a different tone quality that is different from the non-ducted or non-fipple versions of the musical instrument and makes the musical instrument easier to perform, but takes a degree of control away from the player.

Another division is between side-blown versions of the flutes like the western consert flutes, the piccolo, the fife, the dizi and the bansuri, and end-blown versions of the instrument like the ney, xiao, kaval, the danso, the shakuhachi, the Anasazi flute and the quena. The player of the side-blown version of the musical instrument uses a hole on the side of the instrument’s tube to manufacture a tone, rather than blowing on an extreme of the tube. The end-blown version of the musical instrument should not be confused with the fipple flutes like the recorder that are also performed vertically but have an internal duct to channel the air flow across the edge of the tone hole. The musical instrument may be open at one end or at the both ends of it. The ocarina, the xun, the pan pipes, the police whistle and the bosun’s whistle are all closed-ended versions of the flute. The open-ended versions of the musical instrument like the concert flute and the recorder have more harmonics than the closed-ended versions, as such more flexible for the performer, and brighter tone qualities. An organ pipe can either be open-ended or closed-ended, depending on the sound intentions.