CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

In my advanced ceramics class i have an independent project, I have decided to make an ocarina. I can get the shape and the holes to work, but I just cant seem to get it to make sound at all. I need some help on anyone who has made or has had expereince playing or being around ocarinas.

well being a former flute player, it probably has something to do with the positioning of that hole above where you blow, that has to be angled just right i think.

heres some sites i found, this one just shows lots of different pitches of ocarinashttp://www.ne.jp/asahi/suimin/j ... carina.jpg

and this one shows how that hole should be positioned
http://ianchai.50megs.com/ocarina/diagram.gif

hope that helps!

Yeah it does, that picture shows it a little bit clearer what I have been attempting to do, I just can seem to get the clay to go into that posistion though.

I don't have any experience in making ceramics, but I love musical insturaments, and wish you good luck.

a simple flute would actually probably be alot easier, flutes and ocarinas work off of two completely different principles. While flutes work off of fitting N numbers of sine waves inside of a pipe, an ocarina works like a guitar, (far more complicated harmonics) and it's sound is dependent upon causing the inside chamber to act as a resonator. In the end, the difference is that a flute works based off of the positioning of it's holes along it's length while an ocarina works off of the surface area of it holes compared to the volume of it's resonance chamber. This makes the ocarina more complicated to work with mathematically than the flute. Of course, Wikipedia is the solution to everything, but it doesn't have equations for how large you should make your holes on an ocarina compared to its volume no do you have a good way to measure these anyways. But do note, you are probobly making a sound with your ocarina, it probobly just isn't within the human range of audable hearing, which, like our vision, is ever so limited. Another problem might arise from getting the air inside of the chamber to vibrate... However, this ones even more complicated, but I assume that the shape of the mouthpiece is such that it takes care of this naturally.

Good Luck,
Pascal