Hmmm, some interesting things have come out of this 'experiment' so far.
Interesting Thing No.1 Perhaps the most interesting responses are the one that
haven't been written. And they've been not-written by the most ardent, vociferous, and dogmatic proponents of the 'it's the flute' camp. Where are they? I've seen 'em browsing the forum and posting to other threads. Surely those who continuously propagate the belief that certain woods possess distinct 'tonal qualities' would have absolutely no difficulty with this test? Of course, if they don't want to play, we can only surmise as to the reasons why. Guess what I'll be surmising.
Interesting Thing No.2 was this:
Unseen122 wrote:I definatly hear a difference between the first and last Flute playing. I can tell that the first one is probably a larger bore instrument and the last is sometihng smaller. Of course it could be one Flute and one player changing their embochure, it would have the same effect.
Shame about the last sentence in the quote though, which rather negates the 'definite' in the first. But, after tapping me teeth with a pencil for a while it came to me that Unseen is 17 (please correct me if I'm wrong, Avery). Which means, if he hasn't already devastated his hearing playing those feckin' awful Agony-Bags, he may be hearing something in the track that those of us who are older (some of us considerably older) simply cannot detect. Advancing years progressively reduces the high-end response of our ears. But his statement is too vague to be of value as it stands. Avery, perhaps you could do us a favour? Play the track again, and tell us the time at which you think you hear a transition from 'a larger bore instrument' to 'something smaller' or the 'change in the player's embouchure'. That way we can all have a listen again to see if we can hear what your younger (and therefore higher range) ears are picking up.
Interesting Thing No.3: There's been only one serious attempt at question E.
BigDavy wrote:Tone - flute like.
Which, oddly enough, is what all the non-flute-players who've heard the track have told me..."sounds like a flute". And which of course is quite right. It does indeed sound like a flute, and not a congealed dairy product or a member of the animal kingdom.
Now you'd think, given the endless reams of adjectives spewed around here on flute tone (quite often by those non-participants mentioned in Thing No.1 above) that it'd be a relatively simple question to answer. From the huge list of such frequently-bandied adjectives as sweet, pure, rich, complex, full-bodied, creamy, buttery, reedy, honking, buzzing, barking, edgey, hard, soft, focussed, centred, unfocussed, breathy, bright, dark, light, sombre, chocolatey, full, round, woody, woodier, warm, cold, dead, &c &c &c &c ad infinitum, you'd think there'd be no difficulty assigning at least half a dozen to the test track.
But no. Nothing, except of course for the delightfully amusing aromatic wags! Which is a shame, because here's a chance for the adjective-brigade to agree upon and fix a set of standard adjectives to a tone that everyone can hear and use as a reference... "Aha! So *that's* what they mean by rich-complex-full-centred-honking-focussed-creamy-dark-edgey-reedy!"
Interesting Thing No.4: Approaching 700 'views', only 28 responses (and a few of those are cow-bell and belly-button related).
However. Interesting Things aside, it has been brought to my attention that some folks don't necessarily visit C&F every day, or perhaps can only visit at weekends. So, to give them all a fair chance I'll wait until Monday to post the answers to A,B,C, and D. I reckon BigDavy nailed E.
I think I'll bookmark this thread and point certain individuals to it next time they start wittering on about "xwood has a warm dairy product tone, but ywood has a hard buzzing tone". It might spare us all a long winter...
Pants. I forgot to put in a question F about sports cars.
"It might be a bit better to tune to one of my fiddle's open strings, like A, rather than asking me for an F#." - Martin Milner
! I'm only a beginner with no musical background and my musical hearing skills are pretty poor so when I listened I only heard 6 different flutes but I'm sure I'm way off here and I lack the confidence to comment because I'm not good with jargon re tone and timbre and what have you, which means I leave that up to the experts but I do have a personal preference when listening, so I can hardly wait for the results but I would have to laugh if it's one and the same flute when I'm hearing six 
- not sure what that would say about my mental state 
