An instrument’s playability depends on many cooperating, accurately tuned resonances

Evidence

Playing a wind instrument depends on many resonances simultaneously. As Arthur Benade put it: “the more resonances that are present to cooperate and the more accurately these are tuned, the easier it is to play the notes.” Easy means there are stable valleys that lips or reeds naturally fall into, buzzing at a certain preferred frequencies. Periodically buzzing reeds are full of harmonics, and if each of these falls on a resonance of the instrument, the valley is deep. — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 1555

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘playability’ in terms of stable resonance valleys that fall into cooperating harmonics.
• SEED: Could build a piece on how instrument design is really a harmonic-engineering problem — a cappella or synth harmonics as valley-carving.
• XREF: connects to: Air and tap resonances align with open-string fundamentals that differ across instrument sizes — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 1151; Body resonances aligned to open-string fundamentals give each string instrument its timbre — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1126