Researchers reveal the key to sexy saxophone playing

Washington, Feb 8 : Amateur saxophonists have long been wondering why they can't hit the sharp high notes like jazz legend John Coltrane. Now researchers have given an answer by finding that unlike amateurs, pro sax players have learned to flex their vocal tracts in a special way to amplify the high notes.

A saxophone's sound comes from a flexible reed in the mouthpiece that controls the airflow and pressure through the instrument, setting up strong air vibrations or resonances if a player blows the right way.

Musicians and scientists have debated the role of the player's vocal tract. Some contended that saxophonists have to shape their vocal tracts with their tongues and jaws to create a matching resonance.

"It would make sense for the vocal tract to influence your overall sound, because sometimes just by listening to how somebody plays a line you can tell who it is," Live Science quoted acoustician Jer Ming Chen of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

But until now, he says, there has been no way to directly measure the acoustics of a vocal tract in mid-note without interfering with the player's sound.

To make a direct measurement, Chen and two of his colleagues in Sydney modified the mouthpiece of a tenor saxophone. They added a device that would emit a combination of 224 tones into the vocal tract of the player, simultaneously recording the intensities of the tones as they bounced back into the mouthpiece, from which they could deduce the vibrations in the tract.

The team recorded five professional and three amateur saxophonists as each played a scale on the modified sax. All players could sound notes below the high, or altissimo, range.

For those pitches, there was no strong relationship between resonances in the vocal tract and instrument. Only the pros, however, could break into the altissimo, where a clear relationship emerged.

The resonance of the players' vocal tracts was right around that of the note they were playing, the researchers said.

The effect is to amplify the sound of the high notes, which are naturally weak in the sax, Chen says.

Chen added that for pro saxophonists to reach these notes, "they say they have to hear the sound in their head, to kind of get a mental image of the sound. This suggests they have some muscle memory with this tuning. I think that means anyone can learn how to do this, but you need to put in a lot of practice to get that same muscle memory."

The researchers are now attempting to see if similar effects are happening in other saxophone techniques , "such as subtone playing, where you're trying to play the lowest notes on the sax very softly," Chen said.

The study appears in the Feb. 8 issue of the journal Science.

ANI