Flutopedia - an Encyclopedia for the Native American Flute

Flute and Sound Calculators and Tools on Flutopedia

Flutopedia is host to five tools to help makers and players explore the characteristics of sound and provide some guidance to makers in crafting flutes and laying out the finger holes:

Basic NAF Design Tool — A tool for finding notes and finger layouts for a wide range of flutes (five- and six-hole minor pentatonic, diatonic, Anasazi style, Mojave style, and Papago style) as well as exploring temperament (Equal Temperament versus Just-Intoned) and resonant colors. Note: this tool does not calculate finger hole placement.
Guided NAFlutomat — A step-by-step approach to the NAFlutomat tool.
NAFlutomat — A detailed calculator for finger hole placement on pentatonic minor, six-hole, mode 1/4 flutes.
Pitch-to-Frequency Calculator — Convert between musical pitch and the frequency of the sound (in both directions).
CrossTune — A tool for tuning a Native American flute in one environment (temperature and humidity) to be played in a different environment.
The Color of Sound — A tool for exploring the relationship between notes and their consonant colors.

This page provides some background documentation for these calculators.

How Do the Calculators Work?

All the calculations are currently in JavaScript and are part of the web page of each of the calculators. When you work with a calculator, there is no code executed on another server (as happens when you, for example, ask a search engine to perform a search). All the calculations are done on your local machine.

Who Wrote the Code?

The tools and calculators on Flutopedia are a true collaboration among people with different backgrounds working in widely varying disciplines.

Most of the acoustic equations used in these calculators are based on a series of books written by Lew Paxton Price ([Price 1991] and [Price 1997]) and described on Lew's web site. Pete Kosel implemented these in a basic JavaScript calculator that is still available on Pete Kosel's web site.

Edward Kort used the Pete Kosel calculator as the basis of a greatly enhanced version of Flutomat that is available in the file of the Native Flute Woodworking Yahoo Newsgroup.

I (Clint Goss) use the Edward Kort version of Flutomat as the basis for most of the acoustic calculations on these calculators, and track changes and updates in the Edward Kort version and reflect them on this site. I have changed the interface (look and feel) to work with this web site.

I have also developed the Basic NAF Design Tool, CrossTune, and The Color of Sound tools, using the core code from Edward Kort's Flutomat. I have also coded a JavaScript version of an algorithm for RGB rendering of color frequencies that was implemented in C# by Phillip Laven that was originally from a Fortran coding of an algorithm from Dan Bruton's Color Science Page. See the The Color of Sound tool for more detailed information on the conversion of wavelengths of light to RGB colors.

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To cite this page on Wikipedia: <ref name="Goss_2022_calculators"> {{cite web |last=Goss |first=Clint |title=Flute and Sound Calculators on Flutopedia |url=http://www.Flutopedia.com/calculators.htm |date=7 June 2022 |website=Flutopedia |access-date=<YOUR RETRIEVAL DATE> }}</ref>