have been attracting me since childhood and stirring me to more research. It is interesting to see some common and different aspects in between speaking languages and playing the trumpet.

The human speech production system and the trumpet share a similar mechanism of acoustic sound generation. The sources of their sounds originate from the vocal cords (or folds) when speaking, and the lips when playing the trumpet. The air stream flowing into a tiny slit-like space formed between the vocal cords or between the lips causes an oscillatory movement of those bodies due to Bernoulli’s principle, resulting in periodic vibration of air. During the air vibration propagates in the oral cavity (vocal tract) or in the trumpet tube, the amplitudes of each frequency component involved in the vibration are differently modified depending on the shape of the cavity or the tube. The resulting air vibration is radiated at the mouth or the bell of the trumpet. These are the basic processes of sound generation in speech and trumpet.

The air vibration sources resulting from the oscillatory movements of the vocal cords and the lips have similar frequency characteristics, where all frequency components are sparsely distributed at an equal interval on the frequency axis. The frequency interval corresponds to the reciprocal of the oscillation period, and can vary depending on the stiffness of the bodies and the size of the slits between the vocal cords or between the lips.

Both the vocal tract and the trumpet tubes work as a “filter” with a specific transfer characteristics which modifies the air vibration sources. See the figure below. The vocal tract filter moderately affects the amplitudes of each frequency component of the voice source, resulting in a specific speech sound such as vowels. More study here. On the other hand, the trumpet filter has a series of sharp peaks equally spaced along the frequency axis, where the between-peak interval is reciprocally proportional to the whole length of the tube. A strong “resonance” occurs only when the frequencies of the source components match the peak frequencies of the filter. A frequency mismatch between the source and the filter results in a thin tone with little volume. This is where the importance of good lip control comes in.

Another similarity in speaking and playing the trumpet is that both require so much time and effort before you gain full control over them. Playing trumpet can be frustrating from time to time, because you tend to lose control so easily after just a few weeks of absence from regular exercise. It is exactly the same in the case of speaking a foreign language, isn’t it? Both teachers of trumpet and foreign languages will tell you the same thing: “Don’t neglect daily exercise!”