Comparing the Hawaiian Nose Flute with the Western Concert Flute

This presentation will compare the spectral and expressive characteristics of the Hawaiian nose flute with the western concert flute. The Hawaiian nose flute is a bamboo courtship flute. This presentation will give live demonstrations on several nose flutes and the western flute, along with brief descriptions of the musical and spectral characteristics of these instruments, and then describe the additive synthesis design template used to capture their subtle timbral characteristics using score data in Csound. In addition, the expressive design successfully uses spectral interpolation for the idiomatic ornamental phrasing for each instrument. A special amplitude/frequency function modulation method simulates the trills, which are also slurred within phrases of varying numbers of notes. [This work was supported by the RGC Competitive Earmarked Research Grant 613505, with special thanks to Rodney ‘‘Kala’’ Willis for making the nose flutes.]