Re: wind instrument +- filtering of broadband noise

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 03:45 PM 12/8/00 -0500, Chuck Britton wrote:
> ... resonances that are driven by sympathetic
> vibrations and those that are driven by more esoteric inputs such as
> 'delta function' hammer blows or chaotic turbulence of wind
> instruments.

That looks like yet another misconception.

In fact, chaotic turbulence is a broadband noise source.  It would be quite
misleading to think that a wind instrument is a resonant filter applied to
a broadband noise source.  The musician does not _hiss_ into a flute or a
trumpet.

In a flute, in normal operation, mode-locking occurs.  That means that one
frequency "wins" while other frequencies that could have occurred (and
would have occurred with broadband excitation) do not occur.  One
observable consequence of this is that the higher harmonics are
phase-locked to the fundamental;  you could not possibly explain this in
terms of resonant filtering of a broadband source.