14 DAY TRIAL // Did some of your intimate moments get higher when you played the CD with Kenny G, David Sanborn or Candy Dulfer? Now, a research published the journal "Science" has solved the mystery of how jazz saxophonists reach those shaking piercing high notes that amateurs cannot. By expertly shifting the shape of their vocal tracts, they manage to come with those acoustic stunts. This action changes various types of resonances (the amplification of certain sound frequencies).
In the last 25 years, musicians and scientists have debated on how vocal tracts of saxophonists and other reed instrument players influence their notes, and suppositions went from "negligible" to "crucial." But measuring the precise acoustic inside the mouth during playing is a tough task.
"It's wet in the mouth and the acoustic conditions in there are really variable, and it gets really loud in there during playing," said co-author Jer-Ming Chen, an acoustician at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
The research team set up a tenor sax mouthpiece with a device that determined vocal tract resonances and the research was made on 3 amateur and 5 professional saxophonists.
"Our group's advisor, Joe Wolfe, is a jazz saxophonist, and we did quite a bit of measurement with him," said Chen. The acoustics of the vocal tract induced a weak effect on the sound of most saxophone notes. But in the high range, pro saxophonists proved to handle the art of changing the vocal tract's shape, reaching high notes not accessible to amateurs.
"Are these expert players aware of what they're doing? While they don't seem specifically aware that they're tuning their vocal tracts, they are aware they're adjusting something in their throat. For pro saxophonists to reach these notes, they say they have to hear the sound in their head, to kind of get a mental image of the sound. This suggests they have some muscle memory with this tuning. I think that means anyone can learn how to do this, but you need to put in a lot of practice to get that same muscle memory," said Chen.
The team is going to investigate if similar processes are involved in other saxophone techniques , "such as subtone playing, where you're trying to play the lowest notes on the sax very softly. It's easy to play those loud, but it's quite a bit of a struggle to play them soft. Or we can look at multiphonic playing, where you play multiple notes at the same time. We can also see if this tuning phenomenon happens in other single-reed instruments such as the clarinet, or double-reed instruments like the bassoon and oboe," added Chen.