On 12/23/2015 5:09 AM, Tim R wrote:
On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 6:21:31 PM UTC-5, Bennett Price wrote:

Could you give a citation, reference (or even a URL) to the article.
I'd love to read it.
Thanks

Sure. At the risk of veering off topic, so with apologies.

Background: For centuries musicians have ascribed tone properties to the materials instruments are made of, while physicists shake their heads because the math seems to say that given sufficient wall thickness the material should make no difference. Physicists who play an instrument are of course caught in the middle.

When the argument gets rehashed, which happens frequently, the skeptics point to the Smith review:
http://la.trompette.free.fr/Smith/IOA/material.htm
There are of course many more papers than that that didn't find a difference but that's the easiest to find and understand. It reviews 13 of the better studies. It isn't that easy to make two identical instruments of different materials, or in fact two identical ones of the same material.

There are only two "studies" that get quoted by the true believers: the Schilke study, quoted he
http://www.dallasmusic.org/schilke/Brass%20Clinic.html
which is the one under discussion currently. You can see there is no date, no description, no publication, it's just a handout from a sales convention.
The other one is the famous Conn study which suffers from the same absence of the actual original report so it gets quoted by both sides.

Warning Off topic:

Thanks for the references. (I found the 'effect of lacquer' portion of
Schilke's article really interesting and perhaps even convincing as my
girl friend is considering de-lacquering her french horn) I play
clarinet and the same sort of controversy exists for woodwinds -
grenadilla vs. rosewood vs. delrin vs. ebonite vs. rubber, etc. In
clarinets, it is clear that the performers are much more important than
the composition of the instrument on which they're playing. But it's
almost next to impossible to compare apples to apples since, as with
brass instruments, the clarinets made of different materials also have
different bore dimensions, undercutting, and other dimensional
variations. And of course even with 2 instruments made of identical
materials, one may cost $300, the other ten times as much.
And 2 'identical' instruments, same make/model/vintage, may have subtle
differences, particularly in intonation.