(If you are looking for my computer music projects of yore, they are now here.)

I trained as a flute player at the Royal College of Music, in South Kensington, London (opposite the Royal Albert Hall), studying with Edward "Eddie" Walker, who played a magnificent Rudall Carte thinned-wood flute, body and foot in one piece, with a platinum-lined headjoint. After leaving the RCM I studied privately with William Bennett ("Wibb") - about whom, more below.

Alongside the usual studies of technique, musicianship, repertoire, I had developed (even before starting at the RCM), a strong interest in making flutes. The inspiration for this was twofold. Firstly, the reading of the book "The Flute, in Acoustical, technical and Artistic Aspects" by Theobald Boehm (1794 - 1871). He was a genius polymath who started his training as a player on the simple one-keyed flute, and, thanks to parallel training as a goldsmith and silversmith, also embarked on a mission to transform the flute into an instrument that could play over three octaves, in tune, in any key, with a powerful sound. The flute everyone plays today is but little changed from the flute Boehm invented.

Secondly, William Bennett himself had a deep interest not so much in being a flute-maker (though he found ways of achieving just that in various experimental ways) as in being a "tuner of flutes" – finding the best sizes and positions for the tone holes on the body. My first experience of "Wibb" was not of hearing him play, but on seeing him in his workshop soldering parts of a flute head-joint together.

Wibb asked me only a few years before he died to "digitise" his work on what is often referred to as "The Bennett Scale". As a modest personal tribute to Wibb, as well as an attempt to fulfil that request, I have created a set of web pages to that end here. It provides downloads of as much of his archive of papers as I was able to scan, and some further historical context from Boehm onwards.

One of my purposes here is to remind players of Boehm's original "open-G#" design, and of how much simpler (and, frankly, better) it is than the closed-G# system almost everyone plays. It is easier (and, therefore, should be cheaper) to make an open-G# flute than a closed one. It is easier to learn and develop fluent technique on an open-G# flute. There is an impressive number of open-G# players around the world, which the living descendant of Theobald, Ludwig Boehm, has collected. Scroll down to the bottom of that very long page. Many well-known names appear there – including Wibb.

Fizzics For Flute Players

And now for something a little different. One of my own parallel interests has been "sound and music computing" - writing programs in languages such as 'C' and 'C++' to make and transform sounds. I have preserved accounts of this activity (which previously dominated the content of my home page) in my Computing pages. Instead, I am planning a new project suitable for schools and beyond, using the familiar computer-based tool Audacity to explore visually the sound of the flute. It will I hope be useful to both students and teachers, and perhaps most of all to those who have no regular teacher and have much of the time to find their own way. Here is a little "taster" of things to come.

"Fizz?"

At a certain usually early moment in learning the flute, we are taught about harmonics, including that we can play quite a few of them. The whole second octave of the flute's range, for example, relies on the player producing a "second harmonic" from the lower "fundamental" octave. The third octave all the way up to "Top C" uses higher harmonics helped by special fingerings, so that, when called upon, we can play them quietly.

But the flute can generate many more harmonics than a player can produce directly. This is where the "fizz" really starts. Our ears can't distinguish them individually (though a few can be with a little practice); instead they all combine to make up the "tone" of a note - whether loud, or soft, or in-between.

Here are two versions of Middle-A(440), both played by William Bennett; one pp, the other ff. (BBC recording, 1993). Each harmonic appears as a sharp spike:

These are "spectrum plots" generated using Audacity. They capture a small instant of time. If we instead capture multiple successive instants over time, we can obtain a "spectrogram". Follow the harmonics: