BLOW IT LIKE BACH

摘要

Scottish physicists have helped a Swiss conservatory recreate the mysterious lituus, a hornrnused in the time of Johann Sebastian Bach.rnBach wrote a part for the lituus in his cantata "O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht." Musicians at Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland, wanted to perform the cantata with a real lituus. But they had no idea what the instrument looked like-only the range of notes it played and its likely sound characteristics. So they turned to fluidrndynamicists Murray Campbell and Alistair Braden of the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. Braden has designed a computer program that models the acoustic properties of wind instruments. The hardest problem, he says, was generating "realistic instrument shapes."