How air temperature affects an ocarina's pitch

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The effect of air temperature on an ocarina's pitch is pretty straightforward. Like all wind instruments, they play flatter in colder environments, and sharper in warmer ones.

When you blow an ocarina, the voicing mixes your warm breath with air from your environment, and the internal temperature stabilises between the two. Ocarinas are tuned to play at a given temperature, such as 20 °C, which is called its 'tuning temperature'.

In warmer or colder environments, when the ocarina is blown at the same pressure, the pitch changes linearly at about 1 cent per degree Celsius (1.8 °F).

One cent is a measuring unit for musical intervals and is defined as follows:

100 cent = 1 half step.
An octave includes twelve half steps, so:
1200 cent = 1 octave.

Correcting for ambient air temperature variation

Because the pitch of an ocarina changes with blowing pressure, it is possible to compensate for air temperature by blowing harder or softer, but this is a little more complex than it may seem.

If you have an ocarina, give this a try:

Finger a low note and vary your blowing pressure from low until the ocarina squeaks, tracking the starting note and the highest note with a chromatic tuner.
Repeat this same exercise on the highest note, again tracking with a chromatic tuner.

What you will find is that the pitch of the high notes is much less sensitive to pressure variation than the low notes. Due to this irregularity, when playing in a colder environment, you have to increase your pressure more on the high notes than the low, and vice versa in warm environments.

In other words, the shape of the breath curve required to play in tune changes with temperature, and the following graph visualises how:

How an ocarina's pitch responds to pressure changes over its range. The low notes are much more sensitive to pressure changes, so to create the same change in pitch on the high notes requires a much larger change in blowing pressure

In this graph:

Curve B represents the breath curve of a hypothetical ocarina at its original tuning temperature,
the steeper curve C represents playing in a colder environment,
and the shallower curve A playing in a warmer environment.

Should you have also read the page on breath curves, you may have noticed that the graph is the same as the one that I used to demonstrate the breath curves of high and low-pressure ocarinas.

In fact, they are actually the same thing. Tuning an ocarina to play at a higher pressure requires blowing harder, and thus requires a steeper breath curve. Compensating for a cold environment also requires an increase in pressure and has the same effect.

But because of this, the ability to compensate for temperature is limited by the high notes. If an ocarina is played in an environment considerably colder than the ocarina was tuned to play in, the high notes will squeak before you can push them into concert pitch.

A temperature variation of about plus or minus 15 °C (27 °F) from the tuning temperature is normally fine. However, playing towards the extremes of available compensation will not produce an ocarina's best sound, and I'd recommend getting an ocarina tuned to play at a temperature close to the environment you intend to play it in.

To learn the pressure curves required for different temperatures, see 'Playing the ocarina in tune' and 'Dealing with warm and cold environments'.