The Science of Brass Instruments
- Submitting institution
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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 2577206
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Springer
- ISBN
- 9783030556860
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- January
- Year of publication
- 2021
- URL
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-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- Yes
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- ('The Science of Brass Instruments' was to have been published by Springer in late 2020 and, following delay due to organisational challenges for the publisher arising from the Covid-19 pandemic, was subsequently published in its final form in early 2021.)
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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2
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- What is the scientific understanding of what happens when a musician sounds notes on a brass instrument? How do the various species of brasswind differ? Why do brass instruments played loudly sound ‘brassy’? These are some of the questions we answer in this monograph. The scientific understanding of how brass instruments work is an area in which considerable advances have been made in recent years, my co-authors and I having made significant contributions to this field; this book draws on that research and on the work of other researchers to present a coherent account.
The writing focusses on relating the musician’s experience of playing a brass instrument and controlling its sound to the scientist’s understanding of sound generation, propagation and radiation. The text presents a simple model of the behaviour of the lips and of the air column in the instrument and the vocal tract, then elaborates it to account for the observed phenomena. A systematic treatment of brass instrument taxonomy gives an account of the characteristics of the great variety of brass instruments in contemporary and historical use.
A number of journal articles and doctoral theses have explored various facets of brasswind acoustics, but no other book has distilled research into a single volume. Textbooks on musical acoustics have included chapters on brass instruments, but none in as much detail or as up-to-date as this book. While most of the content is accessible to a general readership, modelling is developed at a mathematical level which makes it a useful resource for advanced teaching and research. My co-authors and I each contributed equally to this output.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -