What is the difference between whistle tones and edge tones on a flute?
I was about to try to answer this when I rememberd Benoit Fabre who, as as part of presentation to a scientific conference on music acoustics, gave a brilliant performance on the flute, using whistle tones. Here is his response: There is considerable confusion between WhistleTone (WT) and Edge Tone (ET), probably because both are played very softly. Two arguments showing that WT are not ET. 1. The frequency of oscillation of a WT is always fixed at a passive resonance of the pipe and jumps from resonance to resonance as the jet speed increases, while the frequency of an ET rises continuously as the speed of the jet increases. 2. The amplitude of oscillation, although very weak to the ear (because one blows very very softly), when one expresses the amplitude in nondimensional form (which approximately means if one expresses it as a fraction of its maximum possible value), is stronger than that of the normal playing regime: in the measures we made, the amplitude is about 100 times strong
