What Makes the Sound of the Saxophone So Distinct?
Jean-Pierre Dalmont – jean-pierre.dalmont@univlemans.fr Bruno Gazengel Laboratoire d’Acoustique de l’Université du Maine, France Jean Kergomard CNRS, Marseille Cedex 20 France Popular version of paper 2aMU4 Presented Tuesday morning, June 6, 2006 151st ASA Meeting, Providence, RI The saxophone family is a huge family of wind instruments invented by Adolf Sax in 1846. This family ranges in size from the large (contrabass) to the small (sopranino). They are all single-reed cone-shaped instruments made of metal. At first sight it could be thought that the important point is that the saxophone is a metallic instrument. In a wind instrument, the sound is not produced by the vibrations of the body like in a string instrument, but by the vibration of the air column inside the instrument. So the fact that the instrument is made of metal has very little influence on its sound quality (timbre). This is why the saxophone is a member of the woodwind instrument family instead of the brass wind
