Overthinking the apocalypse

I understand how instruments are classified by the mechanisms they use to generate sounds, which influences the timbre. But in my mind I tend to think of the winds by how you, the performer, get the damn thing to make a sound. For me, the xūn has more to do with a shakuhachi than with an ocarina, in that they're instruments played by shaping the embouchure to glide the airflow against an edge to express nuances of timbre and microtones. The ocarina is in my mind in the same category as whistles and recorders, fipple instruments where the pitches are assisted and fixed, so for example dynamics can be varied without bending the pitch. The pipe organ may be technically a wind instrument but it's hard not to think of it as a kind of mighty piano, rather than some type of hand-operated flute. And I really don't see how the detail of whether the flute is transversal or end-blown matters much at all. It seems much more relevant to me that the shakuhachi and Western concert flute are both edge-blown (no fipple), than that the shakuhachi and recorder are both end-blown. A recorder is an entirely different animal than a shakuhachi by virtue of the fipple. In fact I suspect many people use “transversal” as a synonymous for “edge-blown”, just because in one single musical tradition among many (Western European), the prime examples of edge-blown and fipple flutes happen to coincidentally be transversal and end-blown.

If we try to classify wind instruments by how you operate them, how you produce sound, rather than the abstract principle of it, we could for example have:

• Edge-blown/rim-blown flutes, or “flutes proper”: Blowing bottles. You shape the air stream to skim the edge of a container, which resonates the air inside it. Pitch and timbre can be altered by blowing technique, and octaves can be jumped by overblowing. Can be transversal (Western concert flute, piccolo, baroque; Irish flute; shinobue/ryūteki/nohkan; dízi; bansuri; pífano, etc.); end-blown (shakuhachi; quena; xiāo; kaval; washint, etc.); vessel (xūn; xutuli), probably more types too. Panpipes are a variation where notes are created by multiple flutes of different sizes. Overtone flutes are a variation that relies entirely on overblowing.
• Oblique/bilabial/interdental flutes: Similar in mechanism and abilities as edge-blown flutes, but the air is guided by direct contact of the flute with the two lips, often in a diagonal hold. There's two variants of these instruments, either for pressing against the lips externally (kawala; Turkish ney) or to hold by the teeth, with the tongue touching the flute (Persian ney). Examples include all variants of ney and kawala/kaval; tsuur/choor/sybyzgy; the qurai. The reconstructed, prehistoric Pueblo/Anasazi/Mojave flute is in this category.
• Brasses (lip flutes): Blowing raspberries instruments. Sound is generated by buzzing the lips, and the pipes simply shape and magnify the buzz. Didgeridoo; trumpets; alphorn; the jug; karnay, etc.
• Assisted wind instruments: Sound is not produced directly by the musician's air blowing, but instead the air is guided by set mechanisms within the instrument.
  • Whistles (assisted flutes): Sound is produced by a ramp that forces the air to hit the edge at a set angle. Whistles; recorders; ocarinas; sazsyrnai; Native American (=Turtle Island) flutes, etc.
  • Reeds: Sound is produced by two plates that vibrate when you blow them, like the lips in brass instruments. Harmonica; saxophone; mijwiz; pi nai; gaita transmontana; shēng; melodica, etc. There's probably many subdivisions here that I do not have knowledge about; the way one blows a harmonica or melodica seems significantly different from the embouchure of a saxophone or clarinet, and these again from the mijwiz.
  • Electronic wind instruments (EWIs): A breath sensor detects air pressure, speed etc. and converts it to an electric signal, used to synthesise sounds.

And we exclude instruments that have the same underlying mechanisms but the air does not comes form the performer blowing, like the accordion, the pipe organ or the melodion.

The advantage of thinking of wind instruments by how they're blown is that 1) it's not that obvious, and 2) knowing about that allows for technique transfer as well as planning musical potential. If you play the shakuhachi you know you can adapt to a quena, and if you're composing for any edge-blown flute you know that you have on the table glissandi with some variation of dynamics along with the pitch, or breathy sforzando, or accented attacks that briefly go a microtone up; whereas if you play the sax you'd have much more technique transfer to the clarinet than the flutes. If you play trombone and you want to experiment with something meditative, and you picked a bansuri, you'd have to learn it from scratch; but with a didgeridoo you could get started right away.