Difference between a Saxophone and a Clarinet
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- Опубліковано 14 чер 2024
- Saxophones and Clarinets have many things in common, but the sound of these instruments is different. But what is actually the difference between a Saxophone and a Clarinet? It's not the material, not the curviness and it has noting to do with the placements of the holes.
0:00 - Introduction
02:51 - The Flute / Open-Open Pipe
05:13 - Closed-Open Pipe
06:16 - Comparison
07:57 - Solution
10:54 - End
Resources and further information:
The conical bore in musical acoustics - www.researchgate.net/publicat...
UNSW Sydney Website:
Pipes and Harmonics - www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/pipes....
Saxophone acoustics: an introduction - www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/saxaco...
Clarinet acoustics: an introduction - www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/clarin... - Наука та технологія
As someone who played clarinet throughout my entire school life- and who's very interested in the mechanics behind how stuff works- this was a wonderful watch :3
Thank you. Glad to hear that.
Same
This is why our thumb key is octave+5th, coz that’s the 3rd harmonic up
@@nathenielohhhhh I always wondered about that, especially since any types of flutes I've played over-blowing is always just an octave.
As a clarinetist and a saxophonist myself, who's very interested in the physics of it and knows a lot of this stuff, I still learned a lot from this video!
I spent a month learning about standing waves and I’m still confused about it after watching this video 😂
That metal clarinet actually sounded like a hybrid between a clarinet and a saxophone, but the wood saxophone still sounded almost purely like a saxophone.
Even though, it isn't even a saxophone actually.
@@tamasfoldesi2358 Tarogato?
@@tamasfoldesi2358 Someone already made a wooden saxophone; I saw pictures of a wooden soprano sax. The best candidates are straight versions of soprano and alto. However, thin brass definitely has the best "thinness to weight to performance ratio", making other materials inferior and nonsensical.
@@Lucius_Chiaraviglio Yep.
You: "What's the difference between a saxophone and a clarinet"
Me: "I already know the answer. It's the harmonics!"
You: "Yeah, but why are the harmonics different"
Me: 🤯
Also interesting that over-blowing on these instruments has a different effect on the note produced. On the sax and flute, the frequency is multiplied by 2 (an octave), meaning all the "high" notes on sax and flute have the same fingering as the low ones, but just blowing harder. But on the clarinet, the frequency is multiplied by 3 (an octave + perfect 5th). So clarinetists have to "shift gears" when they want to play high notes.
For example, the note E5 on the flute has the exact same fingering as E4, just blow harder. But on clarinet, blowing harder while holding the fingering for E4 will play B5.
That's so cool, I've been taking my easy octaves for granted all this time. Poor clarinets.
Unless, of course, you were from a culture, maybe in this case alien, that thinks of the tritave 3/1 as the point of repetition. Then the opposite would be true.
I suppose I should somewhat specify what I mean. There’s a tuning called Bohlen-Pierce based on the fundamental idea that a culture or species might have based their musical understanding on only odd harmonics. In this case the tritave would be the interval of equivalence because the octave doesn’t “exist”. It’s a really interesting thing to look up. It’s also interesting hearing music people have made trying to utilize this tuning system. I personally am fond of the song “stickmen” that uses this idea.
I play the clarinet myself, and have always been interested in the mathematics behind music, so this video was doubly interesting!
“… therefore inferior …”
Flute: “Excuse me, do you have a moment to talk about your car’s extended warranty?“
This is also explained in "the acoustical foundations of music" by Backus. But WAY easier to understand. Thanks!
Tysm for that tip!
It's not the cheapest book, I'm afraid. But seriously good!.
I found a video where someone plays these different shaped tubes, and one of these tubes seems to overblow at 2 octaves instead of 1, or a twelfth (octave+fifth). The video is called "Pan Flute Tubes Harmonic Combinations"
they're both wonderful tbh. I play clarinet because of the 4 octave range and classical potential while many of my friends play sax for a much different reason.
Very interesting video thanks!
A small correction I would make would be on the gas animations where you give the impression that the gas molecules are the ones carrying the sound wave and moving at the speed of sound where really there is almost no displacement of matter (just as sound wave in solid materials). Of course I understand it is a lot more difficult to animate no worries :) Keep up the good work!
I was going to say the same thing. But the actual pressure wave graph animations, including demonstration of the ones that cancel themselves out, were good -- since we don't usually get to see animation of self canceling at non-resonances, I''m willing to forgive this blooper.
You didn't have to do the flute like that. Simpler doesn't mean inferior. Great vid though
Loved the Grant's Etude reference. It was such a nice explanation.
You are the first one who noticed it. Glad someone picked up on that.
wow, nice trick explaining the issue with a conical bore
This was an amazing video! I knew that the bores of each instrument affected their sound in different ways but I didn’t know how it actually worked math wise. Thank you for putting this resource together :)
Absolutely amazing video! Subscribed.
For a musician who has never held a wind instrument in their entire life this has been extremely fascinating. Now I'm curious why exactly waves in a conical tube behave like that.
Thanks for the comment.
I tried to make it clear in the video but maybe I didn't explained it clearly.
But maybe you want to check out the sources in the description. UNSW Sydney has a great website about this stuff.
Here is the simple explanation that I tried to get across:
In a cone we get spherical waves e.g. the pressure amplitude of the wave goes with 1/r. You get a spherical wave when you start with a point source. Because the energy (=loudness/intensity) is conserved and the wave is expanding in all directions (surface of a sphere=4πr^2), the loudness/intensity scales with I~1/r^2. (The sound gets quieter the further you get away from the source)
The intensity is given by the pressure squared I~P*P=>P~1/r.
You get the same scaling for a cone because also the area of the cross section of the cone scales with r^2 (It’s just a circle).
It's very interesting to me as a beginner to intermediate sax player who wanted to make other instruments or modifications for *unlimited* (musical) *poweeeaarrrrr*
@@pascal_pauli so what happens to the sound if you alter the angle of the sides continuously from completely cylindrical to conical like a sax?
@@pascal_pauli also isn't the octave key on saxes and the register key on clarinets basically creating an open end and that's why it brings it up an octave cuz it doubles the fundamental? But then wouldn't it make all the harmonics even since it's multiplying by 2 thus changing the timbre? Like making a clarinet sound like a sax or flute?
@@pascal_pauli also saxes and flutes don't sound that similar. Is it because of the mouthpieces? Is that a separate independent variable that alters the harmonics? If so how?
Just to be ultra clear, the alto sax and the clarinet pictures shown, the clarinet is an Oehler system clarinet, the keywork is somewhat similar to the saxophone, (check the rollers on the pinky keys) whereas the more common Boehem system clarinet is different.
Wonderfully done! Thank you
At 0:43 my heart jumped for a second expecting to hear the old game grumps 10 minute power hour intro
a superb video.. was looking for such a video explains this subject.. thanks for sharing
It's interesting to me how similar this behavior is to electromagnetic transmission lines. It makes sense, since in either case it's waves in a carrier, but the reflection of the wave at the boundary condition is just the same.
It's also interesting to think about "acoustic impedance". Impedance matching is used to minimize reflection and maximize transmission in transmission line circuits; in a similar way, the reason gramophone cones work to take the sound from a needle moving on shellac and effectively transmit it into the air is that the shape of the cone acts to match the acoustic impedance of the mechanism vibrating from the record to that of the air.
The same process in reverse happens when sound in the air hits our ears. It's why many animals with good hearing (including humans) have some form of cone-shaped ear and ear canal.
I play both and always knew the difference had to be in the shape. I’ll have to watch this at least 10 more times to be able to explain it to someone else. Thank you
Great video, you've win your first french follower, even if I didn't understand everything...
Thank you for the video
Thank you. I was wondering about it
Dude, you gotta make more videos. This is interesting stuff.
Great video! Interesting
I like this video! Good job 👍
Ironically, I actually ponder this question regularly. I find that the clarinet sounds very much like a saxophone when you blow on the lowest note with a very loose grip on the reed. Sounds very similar.
fantastique video
Would love to see a video on various brass instruments!
Right! Like, why does the trumpet, with its cylindrical shape, have all the harmonics and not just the odd ones?
I wonder if there's a way to design a saxophone-sounding instrument that's with a cylindrical "closed pipe" to be able to play lower notes.
As someone who dabbled with both as a little kid, i find this video fascinating!
A great video!
Feedback:
Although there is not much math content in the video, you actually explain the difference quite well.
awesome!
I wonder if Adolphe Sax knew about these wave interactions when he invented the saxophone.
more vids please
Really cool video that finally made me understand how wave motion connects to sounds
great video. thanks. what about a conical flute? would it work?
Buen video.😉👍🏽
I'm curious how this translates to the human voice?
1) what type of pipe are we like, if any? We are able to produce all the harmonics, is that because we're like a cone?
2) are the harmonics we produce caused via addition of sines converging (like these instruments) or from the pattern of the vocal fold "wave"? In more technical words, are human harmonics caused by the pattern of the air pressure in TIME DOMAIN, or by a convergence of perfect sine waves in the FREQUENCY DOMAIN?
why the quality video only get few watches?thank you for making the video，this really helped me，a clarinet flute player，but interested in physics，i was confused for years before watching this，can you make a video about brass instruments？
When a note is played, I (mostly) get how uh, what harmonics are there, is determined, but: what determines how much each harmonic contributes to the sound?
Also, if you play different notes, will the ratios between how much each harmonic contributes, be the same?
Should the combined wave of playing one note be a simple transformation of the combined wave of playing a different note? (Like, just shifting all the frequencies by the same ratio, without changing the weightings?)
thanks
Great visualisations! What software did you use?
Thank you! I used Processing.
6:24 just a quick note - the fundamental frequency is the first harmonic (at least that’s how it’s taught in IB physics) and there’s no such thing as lambda 0.
Very nice explanation! I'm struggling to come up with an explanation for how I can do a true glissando of say a 5th without altering hole coverage on the clarinet, and with half-hole coverage a truly awesome range of noises are possible just by altering reed pressure and air pressure. For a pitch bend I can see that lengthening or "tightening" the reed might alter the fundamental frequency, but my mind boggles at how half-holing works.
additionally, voicing plays a large role in it. if you lower voicing, you're vibrating the reed slower, decreasing pitch and increasing spreadness, while voicing higher vibrates it faster. it's due to the size of the air stream with the same volume of air
Why is intensity proportional to pressure squared and not just pressure? That got me thinking
Loved the video - such an interesting topic. No need for the flute-bashing though :(
I tried to make a joke, I love the flute. But I probably presented it too dry. Sorry to all the flutists.
As a flute student, I felt the same thing, although it's quite normal to do jokes about other instruments and players. You are forgiven.
would you discuss the jump between notes G and A on clarinet and maybe a little history of why that is and how instrument makers and composers used it and how they developed the clarinet around this?
Do you know the kteresting history of the clarinet and its innovations since the time of the Mozart Clarinet. It'd make a great video :)
In the eighteenth century, clarinets weren't able to play in tune in any key. The workaround was to have clarinets in several different sizes and use the one that best suited the key of the music you were playing. These clarinets included instruments "in C", like flutes and oboes. Problem was, clarinets in C have a limited dynamic range and were left behind as orchestras grew bigger throughout the nineteenth century. So now we have the more powerful clarinet in B-flat with the jump between G and A, as you say.
There is also the clarinet in A which has a jump between A and F-sharp. We use this instrument to play solo music written for it, like Mozart's clarinet concerto. Orchestral players continue to use clarinets in both A and B-flat depending on whichever instrument gives the easiest key signature. Sometimes you even have to switch clarinets half way through a piece if the music changes key.
Does anyone know how each of the infinitely many reflection waves shown at 4:14 could be described mathematically? I know the fundamental is y = cos(kx-wt) but I can't figure out the others.
I forget how I derived the formular. I probably did a lot of trying out. But I looked at my code and here is how I calculated the reflected waves:
The primary wave is given by: sin(kx - wt)
The j-th refelcted waves is given by: sin(kx-(-1)^j *w*t+φ(j))
Now I wrote a function for φ(j):
φ(j) = j*k*L if j is even
= -(j+1)*k*L if j is odd
L is the pipe length.
I actually don't know why it works, but I will maybe have a think about it.
I am currently in Calc 1 and so a decent amount of this went over my head, I think I’ll watch this again in 2-3 years when I’ve taken up to Calc 3 and some other classes. The parts I could understand were interesting though
what field of science would this be, geometry and sound. i have seen alot of filter cabinents for hifi speakers but I would love to study this on my own time.
Acoustic science.
the simpler and therefore better and more elegant instrument.
The patented german humour throughout this is fucking wild, some of these jokes took at least ten seconds for me to understand, impressive stuff. Interesting video too.
This is fascinating. But if a saxophone sound different from a clarinet because a saxophone mimics the harmonic response of a flute, why doesn't a saxophone sound like a flute?
That's a great question and you can extend it to a bunch of instruments: Why doesn't a violin sound like a guitar or piano.
The "Sound" is uniquely defined by the mixture of the overtones. For the flute, for example, the lowest harmonics are dominant and it sounds a bit like a sine wave. The saxophone has more complex harmonics (louder higher harmonics). The sound (mixture of harmonics) is called Timbre in acoustics.
The answer to this question is: It's complicated and depends on many factors.
I would guess that the biggest factor is the mouthpiece. A flutist directly gets the air to oscillate by blowing over the hole of the mouthpiece.
A saxophonist gets a piece of wood (reed) to vibrate in the mouthpiece.
I think it's somehow intuitive that a reed could produce a more complex mixture of harmonics, but this would be a good question to investigate.
It seems to me that a reed repeatedly opening and closing would naturally want to produce something that looks more like a square wave than the clean sine of a fluttering air stream.
@@torydavis10 Sounds sensible
formants play a big role there. it's not just about which overtone is how strong, but the absolute frequency ranges that are present in the sound.
the same for our different vowels. different vowels have different frequency ranges amplified.
(in my physics studies we had a basic lab day on this topic, and it was completely wrong. they only focused on the first 5 harmonics and how they differ when producing different sounds, and it just did not work out as it should according to the protocoll.... i found out why years later, when i really learned how vowels work)
An oboe and french horn( or perhaps muted trumpet?) was basically the combination that the inventor was looking for apparently and it sounds as such to me, both conical.
When you asked that first question I thought "hang on! A saxophone's a sawtooth synth?"
very interesting
You should do more content ngl
I can only assume that the video creator was brutally murdered by Lizzo after the remark made at 2:52. 😂
No but i've always wondered the difference between soprano saxophone and oboe
this boy called the flute inferior lol
What's the difference? Clarinet sounds good! JK, JK, I kid. The shape of the bore is also something that effects timbre in brass instruments as well. Trumpets and tubas are bendy cylinders, while a cornet is a bendy cone (if I'm not mistaken). Their big difference with these instruments is that the straightened versions are way to long to be practical in the modern world. Most ensembles wouldn't enjoy every brass player taking the space of a medieval herald!
That's true. Maybe an even more extreme example would be the flugelhorn.
Curious how the conical and cylindrical brass instruments both have all the harmonics. Maybe this has to do with the lead pipes and valve sections being quite cylindrical regardless of how conical the bell section is. Interestingly the conical brass instruments have timbres more like the cylindrical clarinet too… I imagine brass instruments would be considered closed at the mouthpiece end? Would love to see a video about this. Even the physics of the mouthpiece alone could make more than a whole video
Tubas are actually a conical instrument much related to the bugle(not that the tuba is part of the bugle family, but they are both conical bore brass instruments and the bugle family has some pretty low instruments that sound similar to a tuba, not just the soprano bugle that most people have heard and which sounds like a trumpet. If you want another cylindrical bore brass instrument to compare to the trumpet, I’m pretty sure the trombone has a cylindrical bore as well.
In fact, I have even heard one guy by the name of Bret Newton say on his channel that cornets are soprano tubas cause valves + conical bore. He’s the guy that has been collaborating on a project to build an even lower bassoon, the Greatbassoon for the past 2 years and he’s even writing some repertoire for it. I haven’t watched all the videos on said project, but it seems very interesting.
So a saxophone is to a clarinet as a flugelhorn is to a trumpet.
The wind chimes in the background are really distracting.
So why does a saxophone sound nothing like a flute?
The saxophone doesn't sound like a flute because the amplitudes of different harmonics are different for the two instruments.
The flute does not have so many strong overtones and is somewhat comparable to a sine wave.
The saxophone has more overtones with different amplitudes.
I guess the main reason is the sound creation through the different mouthpieces.
Gonna guess before watching and say that it's because the clarinet has a straight resonating column whereas the saxophone has a cylindrical resonating column
Homie just called the flute a simpler instrument. Lost me at that...
The flute is NOT inferior
So they are different because math?
The saxophone actually sounds good
If I were to give any critique to this otherwise great video, it would be to skip prejudiced statements like: "Most people will probably..", "it should be easy to..", "As you know..".
Statements like these serve little to no purpose in a teaching context in my opinion.
For people who 'know it', such statements just waste time. However, even worse: they alienate people for whom the statement doesn't apply -the very audience you most likely want to reach.
I've noticed these kind of statements/prefaces in several #SoME and more generally in other explainer videos on UA-cam as well and I think they should just be excluded completely. Instead, go directly to the content and explain it in a way that is not too basic for people with previous knowledge and without alienating newcomers. A hard ask for anyone of course, but one that you and many others strive towards and succeed with in many ways.
Thank you for your criticism.
That's a good point that I hadn't thought about.
If I create content in the future, I will try to avoid these types of phrases.
I can't help but think we need a pipe length joke
Did anyone else not understand any of that?
A 71cm SEXophone ?? 🤣
Sorry... I had to take this one out of the system 1st. Great video & explanation. Keep up with the good work !
1:59 the lowest note that a alto can do is a concert Db3, Teno sax is in the key of Bb the lowest note is a Ab2, while Bari sax is a octave lower than alto, the Low A extension makes the lowest not to be a Concert C2, still this video is fantastic in showing how sound, the harmonic series and shape and unique things this two instruments had
But they're talking about the soprano. That should be quite clear, from how they said "the straight saxophone" and specified the length.
EDIT: You can even see it in the Google search on screen
@@mymo_in_Bb alright, i commit a mistake, i didn’t hear that part, i see the video but I didn’t hear that it was talking about the soprano, thank you for let me know
as a flute player I am deeply offended.
I have never asked myself that question, nor would anybody with a healthy view of reality.
A saxophone is a clarinet with an erection.
I hate the xlophone in the background. How annoying!
Saxophone is the pack a day smoker aunt of the clarinet
Taste
Interesante pero aburrido y muy mecánico al hablar tanto...el inglés es tu idioma principal?......
My first language isn't English, it's German. I heard that criticism before and I will try to better myself in the future. But thank you for the criticism.
@@pascal_pauli your speaking is fine. Some of your sentences were not inflected like a native speaker but there was no trouble understanding. I would have appreciated a little more of the math explanation but I am biased!
The irony of this being posted in Spanish is killing me
Ahh yes another reason that clarinet is better than saxaphone
"The simpler, and therefore inferior, instrument" ha ha ha!