Getting Regulation Over Materials Used to Make Flute?

In response to a forum post asking if there should be FDA oversight over the materials used in making flutes, considering that it is in close contact with the mouth area, with a trend of experimenting on newer materials, and having a tendency to cause bad allergic reactions:

I know where you are coming from, but getting these FDA approved seems a bit of a stretch, considering that no one is really using flutes to work with food, nor is it related to medicine/drugs in general.

CPSC seems like a better fit, though all these regulations are only applicable to the US.

That said, considering that the flute purchasing population is vastly smaller compared to regular consumer products, perhaps such regulatory control might be too much to ask for in general.

From some of the anecdotes here (as in the forum at large), it seems that the underlying problem is incomplete/incorrect knowledge on allied fields not directly related to music-making. From material safety, mitigations to such materials, sustainability of certain exotic organic materials, to the care/maintenance, folklore often passes as facts, with emotional reactions often dominating.

I'm not asking for musicians to be expert physicists/chemists/biologists, but to at least know when to put aside the qualities that make them excellent musicians and to bring out the other "hard" side to examine the material (heheh) realities with a more critical eye to better educate themselves in the fields that are periphery to their primary world of music-making.

It is sort of the same reason why we make STEM-field students study humanities as well. We don't expect the same level of excellence in these periphery fields as compared to their primary concerns, but to at least be at a level where they can apply critical thinking to assess and decide on things that can directly affect their primary concerns.

Singapore Flute Fair 2023, and What I Did There

A week ago today was the Singapore Flute Fair 2023 hosted by MusicGear, with her sister companies. The draw of the Flute Fair was the assembly of flute and accessories sellers/distributors from around the region, together with the appearance of Muramatsu and Miyazawa flute technicians to do light servicing on concert flutes, either in-brand for the respective company flute technicians, or out-brand, as long as the flute itself is not made of inferior materials. That last bit might sound a little elitist, but the reality is the these light services are more akin to fine-tuning than performing major correction, and many of the lower-valued flutes are made of materials that do not subject themselves to fine adjustments, and more importantly, do not keep said fine adjustments should they be somehow applied.

There was also a recital, but since it was to happen in the evening of Saturday when I had my rehearsals with the TGCO, I bowed out from attending it.

This year was the first time in as many years of COVID-19 being the obsession of the world that it has been held. The scale was small-ish, but it still managed to attract a healthy number of participants, based solely on my now third-party observation.

I had fun over the two-day exhibition, trying all kinds of piccolos, and playing with various flutes. I'm not really in the market for buying a new flute (Aurelia is my End Flute anyway), but I am definitely scouting around to learn more on getting a better piccolo. I've tried a Powell Signature, the Burkart Resona and Elite samples, one Bulgheroni Piccolo, and a couple of Haynes piccolos.

Conclusion thus far: the traditional embouchure cut is excellent for wailing like I wanna completely emulate the dizi, but trying to get soft dynamics out of it for the high notes tend to be tougher, compared to wave cut. The wave cut ensured that the air stream was well targetted to provide that sweet sweet pianissimo dynamics for concert pitch G7 and higher. As for low notes, both cuts across all the piccolos were alright---that old problem I faced with a somewhat non-projecting concert pitch D5 was due to me not angling enough of the air-stream towards the embouchure hole to bring it out. There are some slight differences in the timbre, but they tend to be a bit more minor compared to just getting the fullness of the right-hand low notes (i.e. concert pitch F♯5 and lower) out in the first place. Again, the wave cut has a tendency to bring out a more centred (i.e. purer) tone, while the traditional cut allowed a little more noise surrounding it, which does make the tone seem fuller without necessarily contributing to the harmonic content.

Piccolo trying aside, I met a few new people, as well as caught up with some old ones. It was definitely different from before---I was running around as myself, as compared to the past flute fairs where I was running around essentially as her plus one. She was there at the fair, unexpected but unsurprising to me, helping out with being the minder of the Muramatsu technicians and generally being involved with the logistics of the light repair service. That is my guess, based on what I saw.

We exchanged no words. What was there to say, anyway?

Two days of standing about, talking to many people, playing piccolo using dizi repertoire to tease out the compatibility between me and the instrument while keeping the dynamics soft enough to not incur a warning from Brando... it was a very tiring yet very fulfilling weekend. Musospace, the location for this year's edition of the Flute Fair, was an interesting location, to say the least. Good to learn of yet another cool place that I may end up wanting to consider, should I ever decide to put together a personal recital as a private celebration of more than three decades of actively playing on the dizi.

A man can dream, can't he?

Eirian-V Has Arrived!

Feels a bit off sitting in the proverbial saddle, but hey, gotta keep on writing if you know what I mean. Morbidly this blog has a much higher chance of out-living me long after I am dead, and that sort of terrifies me.

Just a little.

To begin with, it is a happy belated birthday to me. Something about the long weekend over Chinese New Year just screams ``don't feel like writing'' to me in a way that was hard to ignore. That long weekend passed on by quite quickly, and I have nothing much to report, other than a delightful long walk with YT on Monday exploring a bit of the western neighbourhood that I had always wondered how it looked like, followed by a reclimbing the old faithful Bukit Timah Hill, and some well-wishers from the few who still remembered when it was the anniversary of my birth.

Moving on, I mentioned some time back about getting the Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition, and finally did. Eirian-V arrived in the last week of January, and I have been using it for nearly two weeks on the single charge, clocking about 1.5 hours of reading per day.

And it's ``only'' at 55% left, which is pretty cool, considering that I was reading the higher power draw situations of full-page manga spreads generated using kcc on some CBZ/CBR collections I have lying about. That extra 0.8" of screen space (6.0" vs 6.8"), combined with much thinner bevels in general meant a greatly increased view space for very little actual increase in dimensions of the device. In English, this means that I can still hold it single-handed, and wiggle my ring finger to advance the page, albeit with only my left hand since there are no dedicated ``page advance'' tactile buttons that allow ambidextrous use the way Eirian-IV had.

I think that's about it for now. It's just a short entry to show that I'm alive, and to mark the arrival of Eirian-V. Till the next update.