A little about Woodwind Timbre and Oboe Timbre specifically

I've always been fascinated by timbre: the quality of a sound, or tone, that distinguishes it from other sounds of the same pitch and volume.

I have (or had) perfect pitch, the ability to identify or reproduce a musical note without a reference point.

I've written quite a bit about this. Here, what I want to say (or repeat) is that I came to this by a fascination with the timbre of a particular note, the lowest note on a cheap Gemieinhardt. The lowest note on woodwind instruments is the most funky, and while the timbre variation on the flute is not as pronounced as on other instruments like the oboe (which this will largely be about), still there is some variation.

Woodwind instruments as a class of instruments are unusual in this respect: the variation in their timbre across individual notes, from one instrument to another, and between different instruments of the family are great. Much more than say string instruments, a piano, or electronically synthesized instruments, even electronically synthesizing woodwind instruments.

There is a reason for this, but I won't go into the technical reasons here.

But to try to get this idea of inhomogeneity between different woodwind instruments, consider opening from a woodwind quintet by Jacques Ibert, Trois Piece Breves:

Notice how the instruments don't blend together. In this clip, to me it feels like there are at least 3 separate color palettes for the 3 sections of this little clip. In the opening, there is the sound of all of the instruments together. And there is a section with the horn solo which has the lower instruments. In the last section of the clip we this particular clip, there is the oboe solo with its predominantly bassoon accompaniment which gives it a more reedy palette.

Note: not all of the instruments in a woodwind quintet are strictly woodwinds; there is one brass instrument, the French Horn.

To give a more extreme sense of not blending in, here is a more extreme example that I like. It adds more brass and some percussion too:

My heartbeat and blood pressure rise every time I hear the above clip.

Now compare this to the string family in the opening passage from Elgar's Enigma Variations, Nimrod Variation:

These examples were selected and contrived to show my point in the extreme. In particular, the Elgar violin, viola, and cello parts are divided so that the first viola parts match the lower violin parts, the lower viola parts match the upper cello part, and the lower cello part matches the bass. So there is deliberate extra blending going on here.

But the point still remains. To me, this is like the differences in paintings I mention in Key and Psychology

Ok. So let me now tie this non-homogenity into the oboe in particular. But in a later post, I may show how the oboe also blends and how that had a historical importance.

Above I gave an example of nonhomgeniety between different members of the woodwind family: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon.

For the oboe, the timbres of the instrument vary greatly as well and that is a whole topic on its own.

However, within a single instrument played by a single person, there is variation between adjacent notes in a scale across the three or so octaves that the oboe spans.

To ease into demonstrating this, consider this pretty well-known example from Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf:

This passage is in the lower part of the oboe's range. As I mentioned briefly for the flute, the lowest notes of a woodwind instrument are the "rawest", not blending, or are richest in overtones.

I suspect Prokofiev picked this low region for its honkiness and duck-like quality. As a friend sarcastically remarked: The versatility of the oboe (which to him always sounds like a duck) and the genius of Prokofiev combine to produce startling barn-yard effects!

Timbre changes in wind instruments are related in a way similar to the elements in the Chemical Periodic table; think of each octave of a flute or oboe as being a row in the periodic table. It has a row-like character or "heaviness". But pitches within an octave (or periodic table columns) also have a timbre similarity as well. (For the clarinet the term "octave" is changed to "register", because the relation at the lowest level is an octave and a fifth

Here is a guide to oboe timbres heard in this passage. The non-natural notes Eb and Db are more muted than their neighboring notes E natural and D. C, since it was the original lowest note of the instrument is also very honky, like a duck. In the last two notes of measure 4 where we jump up to D and B, some of the rawness goes away but you can hear traces of it.

If this is too involved to follow, just focus on the first four distinct pitches, E, Eb, D, and Db; see if you notice how the timber quality changes. In particular open E, muted Eb, Open D, muted Db.

The above was about the lower range of the oboe near Middle C. As for timbres in the last part of the solo: 

The sound of the upper C above middle C has less of that lower rawness and is more pure. The neighboring Eb while having the second octave characteristic still has some of the timber of its lower Eb counterpart, just less pronounced.  

 The Eb is a little more muted than say its surrounding notes E or D. Similarly Db which appears in the second measure is muted too (a little bit more so than the Eb). Bb while not as muted as the lower Eb is still muted compared to C. F is a little muted compared to G that follows. And notice the change in timbre between the C above Middle C and the Eb below it.

Here is the same passage that is heard an octave higher that appears later in this piece. Notice how the register timbre is different and a lot of the coarseness has been removed.

Towards the end of the passage, the oboe goes into the lower part of the 3rd octave above middle C and the upper part of the second octave of middle C. And here the coarseness is removed even more. (But again, I can hear the timbre changes between individual notes.)

I realize all of this may be hard to hear, and may seem like a wine connoisseur describing different kinds of wine profiles.

When I hear an orchestra, as a result of these slight timbre changes, I can pick out the specific notes that are being played, and thus calibrate my perfect pitch sense. I can do the same on hearing a flute as well. I should say that since I played both of these instruments in the past, these kinds of timbre changes have been ingrained.

Oboe Reed Enginering

On a Tuesday night hike, I started ranting about how the Oboe is the most engineering-like in the construction of its reed and how the reed can drastically change the timbre.

In this part, I'll mention a little bit about oboe reed construction. The timbre aspect is equally fascinating but that will be done separately.

Here is how an oboe reed is scraped in the style developed by Marcel Tabuteau and John Delancie around  1948-1951. 

Here is a back-lit image of this kind of reed.  Oboists who use this style of scrape, do hold the reed up to the light like this to see what's up.

In Tabeteau's reeds, the spine down the middle did not exist. However it is now generally added since it makes the read more sturdy.

This style is now popular; it has changed the oboe sound in the U.S. This style and sound then spread to Australia, Japan and Asia, Latin America, England (after a longer delay), and many countries. France and Germany are more steeped in their own traditions and styles and of sound,  so the spread there is less than in Europe.

Here is an image of the "French" style which was almost universally used before 1948:

The image is from Regency Reeds, a seller of oboe reeds from England. There generally is not a backlit view of these kinds of reeds because there is no need to. However, here is a diagram comparing the two

from https://oboewan.com/index.php/about-oboe-reeds/. 

Now here is a back-lit image of a slightly larger oboe used mostly in the Baroque period, called the Oboe d'amore: 

It uses the American scrape, so it is probably used on a modern instrument. The Oboe d'amore is slightly larger and is in A rather than C.  It is a transposing instrument. The current modern Oboe's lowest note goes down to Bb so you might wonder what's the big deal. But in the Baroque period, the Oboes went down only to middle C. And since they had only three keys (where one key was a symmetric duplicate of the other so one could play the instrument with the left hand or the right hand in the upper position), playing in a key like A major (and closely related keys) sounded very different when played on an Oboe in C instead of an Oboe tuned in A.

Now compare this reed with the reed for the smaller Baroque Oboe of the kind used back in the 18th century when the oboe was first developed from an older instrument called the "Shawm": 

The Baroque Oboe is made of a softer wood -  boxwood instead of the harder grenadilla wood or plastic. And the bore of a Baroque Oboe is larger than its modern counterpart, so there is less air pressure on the player and there is more airflow that passes through the instrument.

Notice that as is the custom with the Oboe d'amore, English Horn (in F), or Bassson, there is no cork on the metal part or "staple". This reed is a little bit larger and wider than an oboe. So it is more forgiving than a modern oboe d'amore reed, which is more forgiving than a modern oboe reed.

You'll see that the baroque version in C is about the same size or larger. It is wider or more V-shaped at the tip that goes into the mouth. Also, no cork is on the staple.

Compare the oboe reed with a bassoon reed:

See how the bassoon reed is much wider and the cane portion down to the string portion is about twice as long. The bassoon plays about an octave lower than the oboe.

This means that tolerances are larger and can be more forgiving. It is influenced less by lip mass. The scrape is the French style. Typically there is a wire that can control the aperture of the reed opening as well as help to keep air from coming out the sides. Since there is less pressure, it is less likely to occur on the bassoon. One of the French-scrape Oboe reeds above also has a wire. Wires are typically frowned upon because, at the scale of oboe size, it can interfere with the tone. Moreso for American scrapes than the French scrape where there is more cane bark near the wire. But for a commercial maker such as this English firm, it is more practical to ensure there is no air leaking from the side.

About the cork on the staple. In modern oboes, there is a cylindrical reed well: 

from Yamaha's the Oboe: double reed mechanism. 

In the modern Oboe, not inserting the reed cork completely to the bottom of the well will cause a break in the conical bore wind flow at a place of higher pressure where it is more critical to change sound production. So, in contrast to most other instruments, you can't or don't "tune" the modern instrument other than what you can do by "lipping" the note up or down. (Lipping down is easier than up.) The oboe's inflexibility in tuning is one of the reasons the orchestra tunes to the oboe. (The oboist tunes the instrument by making the reed length and scrape so the pitch comes out correct.)

Other instruments of the orchestra are inflexible too, like keyboard instruments and tuned percussion instruments (xylophone and chimes). When the keyboard instrument is a soloist like in a concerto, the orchestra tunes to that instrument. However since xylophone and chimes are rare minor instruments, those are not used for tuning even though they are inflexible as well. (The oboe's clear or perhaps "piercing" sound also makes it good to tune to).

Python in 2016 feels like C of 1996

(This originally appeared on Quora)

In 2016 I use Python a lot. I've been using it over 10 years or so. But even with that much use it still feels clunky. It reminds me of my experiences with C which go back even longer.

Let me explain.

There are people who feel that Python has revolutionized the ease with which they work. xkcd had an comic about it: xkcd: Python and I guess the pythonistas liked it so much that since Python 2.7 (and pypy 2.6) it has been in the standard library distribution that you can get to it via the antigravity module that was added since the comic came out.

And yes, many find Python an improvement over say earlier languages, much in the same way was felt about C. I can see how they feel that way. It is true that there is such a great body of libraries in the language, like C. Python has about everything.

Except elegance, and orthogonality.

But before diving into that, let me come back to C circa 1996. As I said that's exactly how people felt and I suppose still feel about C. For example, what is the most-used version of Python written in? C, of course. In fact, that version of Python is often called CPython.

Back in 1996, people were ranting about C, I guess rightfully, was because it was like the Fortran for systems programming. So I guess in a sense C around 1989 or so was the Fortran of 1959. And I'll go into the Fortran comparison just a little bit as well.

When I first started working at IBM research I worked with a guy, Dick Goldberg, who worked on the original Fortran project. Back then I felt Fortran was a little clunky too: there was no BNF language definition (but note that the B in BNF stands Backus, the guy that also was behind Fortran. Fortran came before this and this aspect was addressed in general, if not in Fortran).

And it had these weird rules like you couldn't index arbitrary expressions like x[i*j] but you could do some limited forms of that like x[2*i] or is it x[i*2]? And the reason for that was that back then they translated this kind of thing into IBM 360 assembler which allowed a memory index (a multiplication) along with a memory offset adjustment (an add) as a single instruction and the Fortran compiler could turn some of these into that form although it couldn't even re-associate 2*i to i*2 if that was needed.

But the big deal, as Dick explained to me, is that scientific programmers and numerical analysts didn't have to learn assembly language, because Fortran did a good enough job, on average, to obviate that need for the most part.

And then that brings us back to C. Fortran is not suitable for writing operating systems, or systems code and so around 1990 many Operating Systems were written in assembly language. Microsoft's OS's were. IBM's were as well.

But now for Unix, then minix and then Linux, you could write in the higher level language, the same as you could in Fortran for numerical or scientific software.

And libraries were written and to this day the bulk of complex libraries are still written in C: for regular expressions, for XML parsing, Database systems like mysql and postgres, and a lot of systems code. Even the guts of numpy, the numerical package for Python, has a lot of C code at its core and that is very common. You'll find other popular programming languages like Ruby, or Perl are written in C and their numerical packages fall back to C as well. Also the bindings that interface to those C systems.

Inelegance

Ok. So now let’s get back to inelegance in Python.

In Python, some functions are top-level functions like len(), hasattr(), type(), getattr() str(), repr() and so on, and some functions are methods off of an object instance, like the .join() or .append() methods of string and list objects, even though lists and strings are built-in types. So instead of writing in a uniform o.join('a').split('x').len().str() or str(len(split('x', join(o)))) you have to go back and forth depending on which arbitrary way it was decided for the function, e.g. str(len(‘o’.join(‘a’).split('x'))).

This is like learning in arithmetic expression which operators are infix, postfix, prefix and what the precedence is when there aren't parenthesis. And yes, Python follows in that tradition like many programming languages including C nowadays as well. This is in contrast to Polish prefix of Lisp, or the old HP calculators, Forth, or Adobe's Postfix.

I'm not suggesting languages change it. But I am saying it is more cumbersome. And when you extend that notion, it hurts my little brain.

C was notorious for extending that into "address of" (&) and "indirection of" (*), pre and post increment (e.g. ++) bitwise operators (|), logical operators (&&) and indexing ( [] ), and selection/indexing ( . , ->). Keeping in mind the precedence was so difficult that most people just used parenthesis even when not strictly needed.

I do need to back off the comment about top-level versus method functions in Python. But only a little...

"len" for example is a method off of some type like string or list. But it has these ugly double underscores around it, I think that was added to deter people from writing it in the more natural or uniform way like you would in say javascript.

Python does stuff like this: take something that would be usable but muck it up more to make it less usable. And there is a community of Python Nazis out there who will scream at you if you use x.__len__() however ugly it is instead of len(x).

These are the same kinds of people who insist that you should write:

import os

import sys

rather than the shorter:

import os, sys

When you ask why? They say just because. Well, actually they don't say it that way, they refer you to an acronym and number like PEP8, which is taken like legal law. Everyone has to do it that way. Fascism.

The Fascists say that doing things this way makes it easier to understand if people do things the same way. Really? Mankind has long been able to deal with variation in expression without any effort whatsoever. I can write "It is one thing" or "It is a thing" and most people don't obsess over whether it has to be "one" or "a". Actually, in English there is a certain style difference if I want to emphasise the singleness I might choose "one" over "a".

And so I'd argue that kind of nice subtlety is missing by the Python fascists. For my part, I'd prefer stipulating it would be okay to stipulate that every program imports "os" and "sys" and be done with that and get on with the rest of my life and the more important task of programming. The next best thing is just to string along that preamble crap in one line the way Jewish blessings always start "Baruch atoy adenoy eluhanu" (Blessed is God, King of the universe").

Oh, and by the way the "import" statements have to be at the top, (except that sometimes there are situations where they won’t work if they are at the top). That seems so 1980's Pascal like to me which required all constants, types and variables to be put at the top of the program. But in Pascal it was not for the same kind of fascism, but just that the Pascal grammar was limited in that way.

And while on the topic of Pascal, let me mention another aspect related to Pascal. Originally and to the end of Python 2, "print" was a reserved word. Very similar to Pascal's "println". And because it was a reserved word, you didn't put parenthesis around the arguments to print. I'm sure this was thought clever in the same way it was clever in Pascal. When Python 3 came about that changed so that print is now the more regular and uniform function call. Oh, but by then a decade-or-so-old code base then had to change.

Now you might think, "who knew"? Well, although Pascal had that feature (and most other languages including C just didn't), by the time the successor to Pascal, Modula, was developed the mistake was corrected. And here's the point: this was all done before or contemporaneous with Python's start.

It's one thing to make a mistake and correct it. But another thing to make the same mistake as was just fixed in another language, and then spend several years before you fix it the same way everyone else does. Pascal and Modula were developed in Europe, same as Python, so it's really no excuse not to have known about it.

Stubbornness and Doing things differently

So why is it that such things take so long to address? The Python language has been stubborn and unrelenting in its wrongness. I think Guido now agrees that indentation thing was a mistake. However there was a long period of time when its superiority was asserted. To me, the mistake is not so much about using indentation for a block begin, but the lack of adding even an optional "end" terminator.

But because of Python's indentation, printing python programs in print is subject to error since there isn’t the needed redundancy check. And more seriously, you can't embed that in another a templating language because the templating can mess up the fragile indenting. So if you are doing say web development in Django, you need to learn another language which of course doesn't have that indentation rule. Ruby programmers don't suffer that limitation and their templating systems use Ruby.

It also feels to me like stubbornness and arrogance that Python has long resisted using common idioms of other languages. (By the way, I sense that Dennis Ritchie and Guido Rossum are a little similar here). So the backtick notation of shell, Perl, and Ruby is not in Python. Nor for a long time was there simple variable interpolation. (In Ruby that's done via # rather than $ but the change was for technical reasons, not arrogance or a desire to do things differently).

In Python, how to do subprocesses has changed over the years, and still isn't as simple as backtick. But I suppose that has some cover because there are security considerations. Variable interpolation inside a string was also long resisted, although there was something like the C format specifiers inside a string with the '%'. But once Python added its own flavor of variable interpolation using the .format() method C style variable format specifiers are eschewed.

This kind of being the last on the block to give in to something that is common among other languages and then add it in a different way seems to be the Python way. A ternary if/else operator that C introduced and adopted in other languages is another example.

For those that want to work across multiple languages this kind of awkward originality just adds more warts.

Like Python, when C first came out, it had a number of unfamiliar things like all those post and pre operators, I guess the format specifier thing, variable arguments, the C preprocessor with its macro expansion. (Many of these weren’t strictly unique: you could find examples of these things elsewhere, such as in assemblers; but compared to say the high-level ALGOL-like languages and things like Cobol or Fortran, this was different). In C's case though they largely stuck to this and didn't change course. When developing Go, the mistakes of C were just fixed and so there I feel that Go is a very welcome upgrade to C.

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Misc other things: comprehensions (not needed in better-designed languages), language drift, import statements.