360° labial pipe

Receiving a new challenge

After not working on organ pipes since June 2019, I got a request from Axel Eichhorn on Thingiverse, which made me research and write organ pipe related code again, about labial pipes that have a 360° labium. All the information is in the videos, therefore who likes text can read the text and who likes to watch me talk can watch me talk.

So far built by Kuhn and Hey

As far as I know, there are two companies who made such pipes so far. Kuhn calls them 'Flauto mirabilis' and builds them since 2003, and Hey built one instrument named 'Vox Maris' in 2012, here is the description on their own webpage, and it was described in ISO 43.

Own production

Like I always did it when making labial pipes, I decided to use plastic pipes and only 3d-print the intricate part. 0.22 was the first file I made. It sounded surprisingly well but it was a little bit finicky to print and I found that the Cut-up influences the sound a lot and it was impossible to make that fixed without glueing the pipe together, which I didn't like to do since I had suddenly found joy in intonation.

To fix those limitations, I wrote 0.23, where the Cut-up can be adjusted with a screw, you can see it in the image.

Those two models worked well but require that the pipe has an edge which functions as a labium. Since this isn't always given, I wrote 0.24, where the labium is printed as well. Unfortunately it didn't sound as well, which possibly is an issue of nozzle size, 0.4mm might be too thick for such small pipes.

Things I found

• The slit has to be thin, figure out what your 3d-printer can do. If it is too wide, you won't get sound at all.
• The Cut-up has to be low-ish.
• The pitch doesn't vary much with different air pressure, much less than what I knew from normal labial pipes. I was looking for that because I knew that the Vox Maris has dynamic abilities, and it is interesting for my currently inactive project of working on organs with dynamics that is informed by pressure (and not by speed, which is what you get with current MIDI-keyboards).
• Pipes with a 360° labium are candidates for high pressure (this got confirmed by Kuhn, and the Vox Maris obviously is high pressure too, it works with pneumatic tech).

Further developements

After the video was published, Aaron commented 'That is great for tuning!', which inspired me to code new tuning devices that work very alike the flauto mirabilis model, and publish a video about voicing and said tuning devices, which is described in another article.