An Amazing Oversight

1975 - a short article by Stuart Kolbinson

It's no secret that everything is going to pot these days. Pick up a newspaper or magazine, turn on your TV set, listen to the radio ---- pollution, crime, drugs, inflation, strikes, artificial additives to our food, and so on and on.

Physicists tell us that to every action there is an equal and positive re-action. So we have anti-pollution groups, anti-crime, anti-drug, anti-strike, and natural food organizations. Like all good citizens of our great democracy, I heartily approve of these organizations.........provided, of course, that they don't affect my standard of living.

Yes, it is our duty to be anti-something, but we should be consistent, don't you agree? I am thinking in particular of those good folks who are getting more recruits to their ranks every day, to wit: the Natural Food People. It is to these fine citizens that I am about to reveal my dread secret, which has hitherto been kept in darkness by who knows what sinister interests. The secret is this:
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Tone Developing in the Labial Pipe

Essay fragment, date unknown, followed by translation from German text

According to the study of Fletcher & Thwaites (Scientific Monthly Jan '83 ed), lip offset effect diagram p 102, "if the lip were exactly centred on the jet, the pipe would deliver only the fundamental frequency and the third harmonic. With the lip offset at the location shown (ie slightly to the outside of the centre of the wind jet), the second and fourth harmonics are introduced, greatly enriching the quality of sound."

It would appear Fletcher & Thwaites were speaking only of cylindrical pipes, though one would suspect that if their conclusions were correct, the same would hold true for wooden "rectangular" pipes as opposed to cylindrical.
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