Review : Sommer Musik nose flutes

I ordered and received two Nasenflöten by Martina Sommer, at sommer-musik.de. Martin and Martina Sommer are wood instruments makers, located in Berlin, Germany. Their workshop is the one you can see in the video here.

I ordered the 2 models, adult and children sized, and was pleasantly surprised to receive the hand-free nose flutes, nicely packed and already mounted with a matching color leather cord.

I just asked Martina a dark flute and a light one, and to choose nice pieces of wood. I'm very pleased with Martina's choices : I got a dark brown adult flute, with quite angular and convex shape, made of nicely grained walnut and elm. And the smaller one, with rounded design, concave front side, light and colored (mapple and cherry).

The flutes are quite small (5.4 x 3.8 cm for the bigger one, and 5x4 cm for the children size), but are made with care and attention, nice assemblings and beveled edges. The rear is comfortable for the nose rest as for the upper lip contact zone.

The rear side is also drilled of two holes sized in order to fit the cord knot, and are coninued by a lateral hole, of the diameter of the leather lace. This is really well done and conceived, thus avoiding the ungracious rise of the knot above the surface.


The technical choices and dimensions are a bit surprising, but lead to a good result. The air duct has a quarter-rounded section as thick as 3 millimeters at its largest. The mouth hole is a perfect circular hole with a 10 mm diameter, broadening in an elliptic cone at the rear, up to 20 mm at its largest. The distance between the air duct exit and the lowest part of the (circular) labium is 12 mm, which is a very large dimension compared to other nose flutes (for instance, on a plastic Humanatone, this distance is 6.5 mm).

On the "down" side, the "mouth cone" of my child size flute is not perfectly centered, leading to a disgracious encroachment on the side. This is a detail, only known by the player (me:), since that is not visible from the outside.

However, those two flutes work pretty fine and produce a good woody sound, clear and loud. The basses are easy to get, thanks to the mouth cone, adding some "free" room to the mouth

Here is a short sound sample (Lully, the Night ballet !) :



Martin and Martina Sommer website is here.
And here is a video in which Martin Sommer plays the Nasenflöte.