Flute

   The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. The flute does not use reeds like a clarinet or saxophone, reeds but, is an aerophone which produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening. Flutes are generally categorized as Edge-blown aerophones.

 

  The oldest flute believed to have ever been discovered is a fragment of a cave bear femur. It was discovered in Slovenia and dated to be about 43,000 years old. In 2008 another flute dated to be about 35,000 years old was discovered in Germany. The five-holed flute has a V-shaped mouthpiece and is made from a vulture wing bone.

  A playable 9000-year-old bone flute made from the wing bones of red-crowned cranes were excavated from a tomb in a Central Chinese province of Henan.

   A flute produces sound when a stream of air blown across a hole in the instrument. This creates a vibration of air at the hole making sound.

   The air stream across this hole creates a siphon. This excites the air contained in the usually cylindrical resonant cavity in the flute. The player changes the pitch of the sound produced by opening and closing holes in the body of the instrument. By varying the air pressure, a flute player can also change the pitch of a note by causing the air in the flute to resonate at a harmonic other than the fundamental frequency without opening or closing any holes.

  To make louder sounds, a flute must use a larger resonator, a larger air stream, or increased air stream velocity. A flute's volume can generally be increased by making its resonator and tone holes larger. This is why a police whistle, a form of flute, is very wide for its pitch, and why a pipe organ can be far louder than a concert flute: a large organ pipe can contain several cubic feet of air, and its tone hole may be several inches wide, while a concert flute's air stream measures a fraction of an inch across.

                    

   The Western concert flute is a descendant of the 19th-century German flute. It is a transverse flute which is closed at the top. Near the top is the embouchure hole, across and into which the player blows. It has larger circular finger-holes than its baroque predecessors, designed to increase the instrument's dynamic range. Various combinations can be opened or closed by means of keys, to produce the different notes in its playing range. There are a total of 25 working keys on a western concert flute. The note produced depends on which finger-holes are opened or closed and on how the flute is blown. There are two kinds of foot joints available for the concert flute: the standard C foot (shown above) or the longer B foot with an extra key extending the flute's range to B below middle C. There can also be a Bb below middle c foot joint added to the instrument.

   The standard concert flute is pitched in the key of C and has a range of three octaves starting from middle C (or one half-step lower with a B foot). This means that the concert flute is one of the highest common orchestral instruments, with the exception of the piccolo, which plays an octave higher. G alto and C bass flutes, pitched, respectively, a perfect fourth and an octave below the concert flute, are used occasionally. Parts are written for alto flute more frequently than for bass. The contrabass, double contrabass, and hyperbass are other rare forms of the flute pitched two, three, and four octaves below middle C respectively.

   Other sizes of flutes and piccolos are used from time to time. A rarer instrument of the modern pitching system is the treble G flute. Instruments made according to an older pitch standard, used principally in wind-band music, include Db piccolo, Eb soprano flute (the primary instrument, equivalent to today's concert C flute), F alto flute, and Bb bass flute.