Clarinet Construction: Barrels, Part 4
After a few weeks of 3D printing new barrels with “correct” measurements (“correct” measurements being defined as measurements that are just a hair too small) and filing said barrels down, we finally had our first working prototype, a rectangular barrel with dangerously sharp edges. Learning from the cut I received from that rectangular barrel, I decided to create a barrel that couldn’t injure anyone, a spherical barrel. Surprisingly, it played quite well!
Listen to these three recordings of one variation from Weber’s Concertino, as played by my friend Greco Neblina:
Two of these barrels were 3D printed, and the other was a high-performance wooden barrel made by Buffet-Crampon. Can you guess which is which?
If you guessed that the order of the barrels were Wood, 3D printed, and 3D printed, you’d be right! In fact, the “Barrel 2” was the rectangular barrel seen in last week’s blog post. Barrel 3 was the spherical barrel seen in the wireframe image above.
It’s important to note that the 3D printed barrels (barrels 2 & 3) sound like they take way more effort to play, which is true. The wooden barrel projects both sound and air better than the 3D printed barrels can, likely due to the fact that the bore (the small hole through the center of the barrel) has been optimized to sound as good as it can, whereas the 3D printed barrels haven’t had that level of design/thought applied to them yet.
With that said, I would like to describe all of the timbres of these barrels in the most objective way possible, so I decided to put all of these sound clips through the online spectrum analyzer, Academo (Academo.org).
As one listens and watches all 3 of these videos one can easily see that the wooden barrel has the most diversity in terms of overtones, having the highest number of overtones overall. In addition to this, most of the sound in the wooden barrel is left in the fundamental tone, with about less than half of the sound left over for the next 7 overtones, whereas the 3D printed barrels seem to share the majority of their sound between their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th fundamentals.
These differences in where each barrel leaves the majority of its sound causes the differences in the timbre for each barrel. The wooden barrel sounds nice due to its large number of overtones while having the vast majority of its sound reside in the fundamental tone, creating a nice, colorful tone.
Contrast that with the annoyingly bright and strained timbre from the 3D-printed barrels, and you can see that the more sound in the fundamental, the better (and the higher number of overtones, the better [generally]).
Here’s a vertical comparison of these 3 Spectrum Analyzer videos for easy comparison. (Props to the clarinetist, Greco Neblina, for keeping such solid time without a metronome/preparation!)
The video above helps display how there’s a large difference in how much sound is put in the fundamental tone vs. the overtones.
This next video is an overlapping of the wood and spherical barrel’s Spectrum Analyzer videos. The Spectrum Analyzer of the wooden barrel has been colored blue, and the Spectrum Analyzer of the spherical 3D-printed barrel was painted red.
In this, one can see that the wooden barrel typically has a few more overtones than the spherical barrel, although they’re generally quite similar to each other.
With all this information, we can conclude that we should design our clarinet barrel to have most of its sound intensity reside in the fundamental frequency AND have as many overtones as possible. We will attempt to optimize our barrel to these two concepts by varying the shape and size of the bore. These barrels, with their own variances, will come out in a few weeks.
