Some historic nose flutes have totally disappear or haven't even been produced or commercialized. Our goal, here, is to reconstruct them, as close as possible to the original, with the help of the patent drawings and descriptions.
[
Sequel of the posts Couchois' Whistle: Drawing a template and Building the flute]
As planned, I "flashed" the Couchois' tin whistle, that is, I electroplated it with Nickel during a few minutes only. I just wanted to protect it from rust. Maybe, later I will plate it with chrome...
Well, here is the Couchois' whistle. It's a very elegant nose flute, made of 3 major parts: the nose shield, the airway and the mouth tube.
The nose shield is maybe the first of the kind. The Carter's Nasalette featured a nose hood, totally covering the nose, rather unefficient, though (air leak). Here, on the Couchois, the nose has just to rest on a saddle, which was magnifically designed. Efficient and beautiful. Looking light as a butterfly, and shaped like a flower petal, in contrast with the solid looking and simple mouth tube cylinder.
The air collector is a very small rectangle, and I was a bit doubtful regarding its functionality. I was wrong, this little square window works fine.
The air duct is great too. Because of its rounded shape, it gets thinner as it reaches the the mouth tube, and thus, accelerates the air flow, as it should be to get a clean and precise sound.
The mouth tube has been designed as a cylinder, which is much more ergonomic than the Carter's rectangular one was. However, 23mm diameter is is bit too big, according to me. As shown in the following video, this size and shape create gaps at the corner of the lips. I don't think this was made on purpose (else, Couchois would have specified it in the patent), but one can take advantage of this "feature": by quickly clogging/unclogging one of these lips gaps, it is possible to produce a tremolo.
I had to correct the dimension of the mouth hole, in order to get consistency of the patent front and side view. The front view shows a bigger hole. However, the labium is slanted (it is visible on the patent) and this was not the case on Carter's.
The overall shape, as already said, is very elegant, equilibrated and quite modern. It really could have been designed in the 1950's. The profile even looks a bit like a Star Trek starship!
--
The Sound
Partly due to the modification that I had to practice on the mouth hole, but mostly to the good-sized mouth tube which creates a big "first chamber": the Couchois' whistle has a quite sharp range.
The short airduct, thinner at its end, plus the slanted labium... all of these features produce a clear, clean and loud whistling. The Couchois' is easy to drive! On the other hand, whether you try to reach basses, the sound gets weak and doubled by unwanted whistlings.
All in all, this nose whistle is a good instrument, elegant, rather ergonomic, easy to play, with a clean sharp sound. It certainly represents a progress upon the Nasalette.
Here is a short sound sample (
When I am Prime Minister, by Markos Vamvakaris):
