Panurge, your record with a 10 second pure sinewave would be exactly what I understand the OP seeks. I didn’t know they existed. Thanks!
I’m a professional musician and composer. All wind instruments require some velocity mapping. Take the flute. The fingering for low G and middle G are the same, but a change in air speed/resistance creates the change in octave.
Similarly, on the saxophone (or any wind instrument for that matter), you can recreate all 12 pitches using overtones -produced purely by a change in air speed (the same finger position).
Let me add that the original design for the saxophone didn’t have any buttons. It was just one long horn that relied entirely on changes in air speed.
What I was clarifying is that a bugle’s pitch is not affected (to any significant degree) by the velocity of the “player’s breath through the horn.” Any pitch produced by anything is related to the speed of the vibrations; that’s the definition of pitch (actually, the speed at which it reverses directions, not the absolute speed). But you can’t extend that to say that every pitch is determined by the velocity of something moving, as in the spirit of the OP.
Nitpicky correction – the saxaphone is a woodwind, not a horn.
Not a musical instrument, per se, but the old Warner Brothers cartoons often employed a sound effect that sounded like some sort of spinning disk with something that rubbed against it. I don’t know what they used, but I’m guessing it produced higher or lower pitches by how fast it was rotating. Similar principle to a police siren. There is a percussion instrument that also employs this principle - the wind machine. It does produce different pitches depending how fast you turn the crank, but the sounds are not notated as specific notes, so I guess that doesn’t really qualify as a tonal instrument.
Hmm, seems to be a modern version of the lasso d’amore.
Technically I suppose so but the colloquial habit, at least among jazz musicians, is to call anything you blow into a “horn.” (BTW despite the name the English horn is not a horn, either.)
Turntabling with a sine wave is certainly the purest example of what I’m thinking of so far. At the very least, the thread is supporting my guess that I wouldn’t be finding anyone playing crisp melodies with such an instrument. (And the thing I wasn’t sufficiently explicit about in the OP (but that I mentioned mid-thread) was that I am interested in instruments where pitch is chosen by setting the velocity of a human body part, not just by setting the velocity of something. Turntabling is pretty much this (where “body part” is “tip of finger in contact with platter”.) )
If you want an example of turntablism melodies, check out Kid Koala’s Drunken Trumpet. Around 3:00 is where the most pure velocity-to-pitch stuff comes in. Throughout the song, he’s using a blend of techniques (as far as I can tell, I’m not a turntablist) to achieve pitches, mostly just cue points on the record with some scratches thrown in, but at 3:00, or a bit before it, he pretty much goes “solo,” using the speed of the turntable only to control the pitch, all the way to the end of the song.
Correct. I’ve even seen the flute referred to as a “horn” by other players.
Furthermore, you’ve got the English horn, which is a double reeded instrument.
I’ve heard that the official name of the “horn” as you mean is “brasswind,” which can thus include a saxophone.
Actually, “English horn” is a misnomer. It’s not a horn at all, despite the name (except in the sense of all musical instruments being informally referred to as “horns” which was already discussed) It’s also not English. And saxophones are woodwinds, despite the fact that they are made out of brass. The designations “woodwind” and “brasswind” refer to how the sound is produced, not what material the instrument is made out of. Brasswinds produce sound by vibration of the lips.