rorybbellows wrote:Thanks Bill
Do you think the master pipemakers of the past were any more aware of acoustical theory than modern makers ?
RORY
Well, two of the landmarks of musical acoustics, Herrmann Helmholtz'
On The Sensation of Tone, and Arthur Benade's
Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics, were published in 1863 and 1976, respectively - so the 18th and 19th century makers could hardly have possessed such theoretical knowledge. What theory they might have been aware of is unlikely to have been of great practical importance - possibly it could have assisted them in creating instruments in new pitches, but it is hard to say.
Then again, I don't think many contemporary pipemakers have a strong theoretical bent either.
Current theory only gets you so far, anyway - it has explanatory power, but only weak
predictive power, which is what you want from a practical viewpoint. A good theoretical grounding can, however, help prevent a pipemaker from "inventing" his own (erroneous!) theories of acoustics based on limited data - I've seen these sorts of theoretical "explanations" from pipemakers from time to time, and they are usually demonstrably wrong from a modern scientific perspective.
There's a tendancy to think of engineering (or 'technics', of which instrument making could be considered a variety) as being closely related to, or even following from, science. But this has only been true in the past few decades, and even now is only true in a few areas of engineering (say, nuclear reactors, semiconductor physics, or nanotechnology). For most of history and in most fields, technology has owed almost nothing to its contemporary science. Take, for instance, metallurgy - almost every metal alloy and technique was known centuries or even millennia before science could explain the effects, and it's only in very recent years that it has been possible to predict the effect of adding particular alloying materials to metal. Before that, the watchwords of engineering were "try it and see".
The old master instrument makers certainly were excellent craftsmen and most likely had a very long tradition of technique and experience behind them - which was handed down in a traditional manner. One of the most interesting questions in the history of the Irish/Union pipes has to do with where the expertise required to make such a sophisticated bore as the Union/Pastoral chanter originated - i.e. what was the precedent? It has been suggested that the oboe-making tradition furnished the prior art (at that time - early 18th century - this would have been the "Baroque" oboe).
Instrument making tends to be a conservative craft - witness the violin, whose design reached such a sophisticated state by the late 1500's/early 1600's that those instruments are regarded as the ultimate even today; every now and then someone creates an "improved" violin using modern acoustical theory, but those new designs never seem to catch on.
I do think, however, that every master craftsman has some conceptual framework for his craft; in that respect every instrument maker is likely to have some "theory" of how the instrument works, even if that theory is not based on current science. Knowing a bit more about how the 19th century makers conceptualized their work would probably help us to understand them and their craft (and by extension, our favorite instrument), better.
Bill
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