 The Manufacture, Operation and Variety of Mouth Organs Sheng and Khène
Acousticians, ethnomusicologists and organologists, these general practitioners and specialists in Southeast or East Asia have come together to create a new general description of the mouth organ and of the free reed pipe. As an introduction to this issue of Circuit, connecting musicians and composers with musicologists and specialists in acoustics and sound recording, this essay takes an approach that passes through history, morphology, materials, details of workmanship and acoustics, pausing to make clarifications or corrections to a literature that is vast but scattered. Regarding the modernization of the instruments and the contexts where it occurs, the authors take the musicians’ point of view into account.