The Questions:
A. How many flutes appear in the track. 
B. What wood the/each flute is made of. 
C. Whether the flutes you identify are 'Prattens' or 'Rudalls' or 'Nicholson's' 
D. The maker's name of the flute(s) if you feel you're up to it. 
E. Describe the tone for the/each flute in the track. 


The Answers:

Four flutes made six appearances in the track, in the following order:

1. Olwell            keyless    Blackwood     (Pratten)    (0 - 4.6 seconds)
2. Ward             keyless    Delrin           (Pratten)    (4.6 - 9.6 seconds)
3. John Gallagher keyless    Dogwood      (Pratten)    (9.6 - 14.3 seconds) 
4. John Gallagher keyed     Blackwood     (Rudall)      (14.3 - 18.5)
5. John Gallagher keyless   Dogwood       (Pratten)    (18.5 - 25 seconds) 
6. John Gallagher keyed     Blackwood     (Rudall)      (25 - 40 seconds)

When I 'assembled' the track I realised that if I did a physical cut-and-paste of sections of music, bright sparks with Audacity or any other audio editor could load the test track and zoom in to look for the joins. So, I used multi-track cross-fades instead. I took a 'snapshot image' of the tracks, but the picture is a bit large and would throw the page here way out. You can see the image of the multi-track layout and cross-fades (volume envelopes) by clicking here (the image will open in a new window).

The green lines are the 'volume envelopes'. If you look at the Olwell track (track 1) you'll see the green line starts at 100% (max volume) then after 4.6s it drops to 0% (no volume)... in track 2 (Ward delrin) you see the green line starts at 0% and at 4.6s rises to 100% for 5 seconds before falling back to 0%. It's the same principle as cut-and-paste, but in the final mix-down track you don't get any obvious 'joins'.

The astute will observe that the track titles are numbered... 1,2,3,5. Yes, there was a 4! But I didn't use it because it was just another take of track 3, the J. Gallagher keyless dogwood.

You'll also note the 'Pratten-Rudall-Pratten-Rudall' sequence from 9.6 seconds to the end of the track at 40 seconds. (That's also a 'dogwood-blackwood-dogwood-blackwood' sequence too). 

"vanessa" wrote: "What a fascinating experiment :boggle: ! I'm only a beginner with no musical background and my musical hearing skills are pretty poor so when I listened I only heard 6 different flutes but I'm sure I'm way off here and I lack the confidence to comment because I'm not good with jargon re tone and timbre and what have you, which means I leave that up to the experts but I do have a personal preference when listening, so I can hardly wait for the results but I would have to laugh if it's one and the same flute when I'm hearing six :lol: - not sure what that would say about my mental state :o"

Vanessa isn't quite as mad as she thought she might be when she said she heard 6 flutes... Of the four flutes, two appeared twice, making the 6 transitions listed above. I'd very much like to know if Vanessa is under 18, or under 24, or under 30... It's very interesting that she heard the six transitions ("six flutes") and no-one else did, given the average age around here and the widely accepted fact that high-frequency hearing loss increases with age.

"scooter587" wrote: "As far as the test clip goes, I believe I hear a change from one flute to another at 9 seconds in."

Good call.


"totokots" wrote: "The first flute plays until 6 seconds in, the second until 9 seconds in. A fourth flute plays from after 25 seconds, and this flute plays until the end of the piece."

Close, but no £5! (What you've said is correct, but you're missing the two flutes playing the three transitions between 9.6 and 25 seconds).


Question D was of course tongue-in-cheek, I really didn't expect anyone to take it too seriously and would have been astonished if someone had identified the flutes by Maker's Name. That would've been very seriously impressive.

Question E had pretty much no takers, except notably the astute "Flute-like", an "airy", a "muffled" and a "hard". With the plethora of adjectives frequently employed on the forum I was seriously hoping for more. Leaving aside my own disdain for many of the abstract terms so often used, this could have been an ideal opportunity to attempt to fix some kind of 'standard' nomenclature that we could all understand to a tone we could all hear. Personally, I think it'd be really useful if we had some kind of library of soundclips so that when someone describes their tone as 'rich, complex, centred, focused, reedy and full with a well-rounded bottom,' we could go to the library, click on the associated clip(s), and actually hear what they're trying to describe. 

Shan't be holding my breath though, for I fear there'd be as much heated debate about what sounds 'centred' and what doesn't as there is about 'tonal qualities of wood'.