Pros tune themselves

Jazz legend John Coltrane routinely pushed his tenor saxophone into the altissimo range, notes far above the instrument’s normal range, and now Australian scientists know how he did it.

Physicists at the University of New South Wales in Sydney said professional saxophone players can tune their vocal tract -- the tube formed by the lips, mouth, tongue, throat and vocal folds or cords -- to produce those high notes.

Their research may solve a long-standing debate among scientists and musicians about how much of the player’s own vocal instrument contributes to the sound, said Joe Wolfe, a physics professor who supervised the research.

As in speech, changes in the shape of the mouth and tongue and vibrations in the air in the vocal tract can be enhanced or inhibited at different frequency. But scientists and musicians have differed about how this was applied to reed instruments like the saxophone.

To study this, Wolfe and colleagues attached a thin probe to the mouthpiece of a tenor saxophone that measured acoustics inside the vocal tract while the saxophone was being played by both professionals and amateurs.

Professional players tuned the resonance in their vocal tracts slightly higher when they played these ultrahigh notes, they reported in last week’s issue of the journal Science.

Adjusting the muscles and shape of their vocal tracts allowed them to play notes higher than those they were actually fingering on the instrument.

Amateur saxophonists did not make those adjustments and were unable to play above the instrument’s normal range.