NOHKAN: Japanese musical instrument
https://worldhitz4u.blogspot.com/2014/03/nohkan-japanese-musical-instrument.html
The nohkan is a high pitched bamboo transverse flute that is
from Japan. The flute is normally used in traditional Imperial Noh and Kabuki
theatre. The musical instrument is manufactured by Kan’ami and his son Zeami in
the 15th century, during the time when two of them were transmuting
the Noh theatre forms Dengaku and Sarugaku.
The musical instrument consist of a divided and tapered
strips of smoked bamboo or burned bamboo, gummed together to generate a
tapering conical bore. The smoking of the bamboo carbonizes it and preserves
the bamboo. The split strips of the wood are reserved to place the hard wood
surface on the inside of the instrument for maximized acoustics. Some
contemporary versions of the musical instrument use an interior coating of
tempera paint for this. The splits are gummed together, bound with the use of
thin strips of twisted cherry bark and lacquered to create a conical bore. The
outcome will be a keyless tube that is about 39.1 cm with an average bore of 1.7
cm wide and there are about seven finger holes.
The musical instrument has an unusual internal bore
restriction of approximately 2 mm to 3 mm known as nodo or throat. This throat
when combined with the conical bore, gives the musical instrument its distinctive
high pitched tune by shifting the overblown notes through venture effect. The
instrument also has an oval hole across which the player of the instrument
blows, and a head joint plug made up of lead cylinder wrapped in paper and was
and fixed inside the tube just above the embouchure hole.
The range of the musical instrument is over two octaves. Each
flute is an individual and manufactured slightly different each time by the
producer of the instrument, the keynote frequency differs from flute to flute.