Music Physics Question - Automatic Trumpet Embouchure Mouthpiece
So this might be a bit of a newbie question. I'm a working musician who mainly plays guitar and piano, and uses a lot of sampled instruments and synths as well. I don't mean this to be offensive to any players who might play and love these instruments.
I understand how important embouchure is to the sound of an instrument, and I know that different embouchures can result in different sounds.
However my question is would it be possible to create a mouthpiece (say for trumpet), that has a preset embouchure and buzz, and therefore is able to play within of given range of notes, just by blowing into it. It would be like modeling the job of the lips, but within a mechanical mouthpiece. Basically the mouthpiece would provide the embouchure, the player would provide the air.
Is this just super duper complicated and what a trumpet player is doing is too unique to copy into a mechanical function?
But if not, could this thinking also be applied to reeds? Double reeds? A harmonica is a fixed reed (which I know is different), that is resonated by an airstream.
Again, I'm sincerely just curious from a scientific perspective and not trying to take away from the years of effort and training and learning that great musicians put into mastering their instruments.
Thanks!
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For me, it is not possible to have a preset embouchure in the sense you mean because even in a lab experiments, with an artificial embouchure, it's not possible to just blow in it : it will give you only a single note! While this kind of mechanical experiments are done, for every different note you will have to make a different compression for the air flow ; so if you just blow in it without a good (professional?) air technique, you will stick to a sole sound. In theory I guess it would be possible, but it implies that you would have an amazing air technique to modulate the air stream, and the difficulty of having a decent embouchure is really much more easier, so the benefits would be really inexistent...
The mechanical solution linked by PiedPiper is interesting, but it isn't really practical. Another way of thinking about this is via sampled/physical modeling.
Using a controller (could be a guitar with a pickup that detects picking sensitivity or a keyboard with velocity sensitivity), and either sufficient samples or a physical modeling algorithm that simulates a players blowing, you can approximate a real player.
Obviously, there are many parameters that go into a brass players playing, and if you wanted to get closer, you would need an instrument that can control several parameters at once, such as the Haken Continuum, which allows for pressure, X and Y control. Don't forget one can always add a foot controller and breath controller (these typically only measure the breath pressure, no complicated embouchure to master).
At this point, you would be investing many thousands of dollars in hardware and software, but you be able to expressively control an amazing amount of sound!
This has been done, at least as an experiment. There's a paper Artificial buzzing lips and brass instruments: Experimental results (pdf download link) in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America describing how they did this for a trombone mouthpiece.
Mechanical saxophone embouchures have been done before as well. Here's one playing John Coltrane's "Giant Steps"
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