You're not the only one confused about that. I've wondered about how the tone holes contribute anything as well. If the sound is caused by a column of air being "excited" by the air split at the far end of the embouchure hole, then it makes sense to me that you would hear at least a lttle of that resonating air through an open tone hole. But then it gets complicated by however the open hole modulates what we hear, whether it acts as a Helmholtz resonance port, and so on.Steve Bliven wrote:The OP continues to be confused by this topic—but feels better as it seems that confusion is broader than just in his mind. The closest that the article from RudallRose seems to come is in the summary in the intro:This seems to suggest that the sound comes out, to one degree or another, from any open hole,l but I can't tell if it is assuming that the bulk of the sound comes from the embouchure hole. Other comments seem to suggest that the nature of the sound varies depending on the source of the sound leak.Once the air in the flute is vibrating, some of the energy is radiated as sound out of the end and any open holes.
I don't know the acoustic theory, but just from practical experience, it doesn't seem to me that much sound is coming from the tone holes. We can get a nice loud D note in both octaves with all the holes covered. If the tone holes were making a significant contribution to the volume, I would expect the D to be weak, and the flute would get progressively louder as more tone hole were opened up, until we get a C# as the loudest note. It doesn't seem to work that way, which to me indicates we're not hearing a significant contribution from the tone holes, except in the sense that venting along the air column contributes to strengthening other notes being played. Well that's my two-bit theory anyway.
Well, we would all be better flute players if we weren't spending time yakking on the Internet instead, but it's too early to wake up the house. So...Maybe the OP should just shut up and blow..