Measurement of effects on tone with lip-protecting music splints for wind instrument players

Abstract

To protect against lip trauma from wind instruments, music splints that cover the sharp edges of incisor teeth are often manufactured by dentists. Wind instrument players who have installed these custom-made music splints often express not only their lip comfort but also changes in their tone quality. In this study, we investigated the effect of the splints to the tone quality. We recorded three types of trumpet sounds such as long tones, arpeggios with perfect fifth, and tonguing tones with and without using a splint, respectively, by a professional trumpet player in an anechoic room. After fast Fourier transform, the higher harmonics was observed more in the splint group than in the nonsplint group, with sharp peaks from 5000 to 8000 Hz. We also examined the differences of these sound groups with recognition tests by two groups of listeners such as professional musicians and nonprofessional persons. Though sound-pressure levels of higher harmonics in two sound groups were lower than those at 400 to 2000 Hz, the musically trained persons recognized the difference perfectly. These results suggest the target of measurement to evaluate the effect of music splints.