I would not be at all surprised to discover that flute tone is similarly variable based on whether you’re pointing the thing at the room or at the floor.
With a flute almost all the sound comes out at the embouchure hole and the topmost currently open body hole. Not very much comes out the end of the instrument. (This is from practice micing flutes for live performance.) This makes me think where the end is pointed wouldn’t be very important?
That’s a new and interesting fact to me! My mental model of why the keys on instruments change their pitch is that moving the open holes in the tube changes the length of the tube, which changes the wavelength of sound that’s emitted. In retrospect, this formulation doesn’t actually fit well with my model of “sound comes out end of tube” at all, but does fit well with “topmost open body hole”.
Modeling the sound as coming from the first open hole does suggest another reason that formally trained flautists might dislike vertical flutes, though: changing which hole is open would cause the apparent source of the sound to move along the body of the flute, so changing from “sounds like it’s moving from side to side” to “sounds like it’s moving up and down” might be jarring.
With a flute almost all the sound comes out at the embouchure hole and the topmost currently open body hole. Not very much comes out the end of the instrument. (This is from practice micing flutes for live performance.) This makes me think where the end is pointed wouldn’t be very important?
That’s a new and interesting fact to me! My mental model of why the keys on instruments change their pitch is that moving the open holes in the tube changes the length of the tube, which changes the wavelength of sound that’s emitted. In retrospect, this formulation doesn’t actually fit well with my model of “sound comes out end of tube” at all, but does fit well with “topmost open body hole”.
Modeling the sound as coming from the first open hole does suggest another reason that formally trained flautists might dislike vertical flutes, though: changing which hole is open would cause the apparent source of the sound to move along the body of the flute, so changing from “sounds like it’s moving from side to side” to “sounds like it’s moving up and down” might be jarring.