The types of ocarina

There are many types of ocarina, and the term 'ocarina' often refers not to a single instrument, but to anything which makes sound using a hollow chamber. They range from sculptural whistles that only play one note to concert-quality musical instruments.

For anyone looking to play ocarinas as serious instruments, being aware of the different kinds of ocarinas is essential.

Sculptural whistles

Sculptural whistles are musical novelty items that can simulate the sound of bird calls and similar. They are produced in various shapes, including those representing birds and other animals.

Sculptural whistles are probably the first ocarinas which developed, and nowadays are often highly decorated with coloured glaze. They make great novelty items, but were never intended to be serious instruments.

Pre-Columbian, Peruvian, and Mexican ocarinas

Various ancient South American cultures used vessel flutes/ocarinas, which, as a group, can be called 'Pre-Columbian ocarinas'. Mexico also has a similar tradition.

Precisely what these instruments were used for is the subject of debate. It is hard to understand their musical use because they differ significantly from modern ideas of 'music'. They appear to have been informed by the natural world, imitating sounds like birds, insects, thunder, wind sounds, and rustling leaves.

Today, the most common version of these instruments are reproduction tourist souvenirs, going under the name 'Peruvian ocarina', and frequently just 'ocarina'. These can be easily recognised by their flat shape, with intricate painted designs and eight to ten identically sized holes.

These reproductions are poorly made, with weak sound production, and are not tuned. They are not good musical instruments and are not worth considering for someone looking to play seriously.

However, historically, they were made to much higher standards. Susan Rawcliffe and Roberto Velázquez Cabrera have studied the history of these instruments. Their work is worth looking up if you are interested.

Transverse ocarinas (Italian and Asian)

The transverse ocarina is a 19th-century Italian instrument. They are held across the body, similar to a transverse flute, but are much shorter and more globular in shape.

Transverse ocarinas were initially designed as serious instruments, with a linear fingering system similar to that of the recorder or flute, and are fully chromatic. Single chamber transverse ocarinas have a range of about an octave and a fourth, and multichamber variants, which are discussed later, can extend the range past two octaves.

They have anywhere between nine and twelve holes. The fingering system of all of these is almost the same, with minor additions that extend the instrument's range at the high and/or low end. See An introduction to the ocarina's fingering system.

If you learn to play any transverse ocarina, you can pick up a transverse ocarina with a different number of holes and play it with only minor changes in fingering.

10-hole ocarinas

The 10-hole ocarina is the original type of transverse ocarina, created by Giu­seppe Donati in 19th-century Italy. These ocarinas have ten finger holes and play chromatically over a range of an octave and a fourth, for example, from C5 to F6.

Due to the physics of the instrument, having a smaller range allows 10-hole ocarinas to have a strong, clean sound through the whole range. They can be made to have a range of different playing characteristics, for instance:

• Play at low breath pressure, with a balanced volume through the whole playing range.
• Play at high pressure, sounding very loud throughout the entire range.
• Play with increasing breath pressure, having quiet low notes and loud high notes.

They can also attain quite a range of timbres, from 'pure' to 'reedy'. All of these factors are set when the instrument is made. As of writing very few makers are exploring this possibility space.

It is worth noting that 10-hole ocarinas may have more than ten physical holes. What would be a single hole can be split into two holes to make sharp and flat notes easier to play, and such is called a 'split hole'. Adding a split hole to an ocarina does not change its classification.

Such things can easily be a source of confusion. It is an issue that arises from classifying ocarinas by the number of finger holes, although I am not aware of any better naming systems.

12-hole ocarinas

The 12-hole ocarina is a variation that was developed in Asia in the 20th century. These ocarinas use the same base fingering system as the 10-hole, but add two additional finger holes that are positioned next to other holes. They are played by covering one or both of the holes with the pad of one finger.

Today, 12-hole ocarinas are the most commonly available kind of transverse ocarina due to the popularity of the design in Asia.

The subholes, combined with an enlarged chamber, extend the instrument's sounding range downwards by three semitones. Thus, a 12-hole C ocarina would have a playing range from A4 to F6. The subholes can also be used to play accidental notes which require half-covering holes on a 10-hole.

This additional range comes at the cost of reduced design freedom and often results in worse sound quality. 12-hole ocarinas play with a steep pressure curve, having quiet low notes and loud high notes, as well as a relatively pure timbre.

11-hole ocarinas

The 11-hole ocarina is a compromise between the 10-hole and 12-hole designs. They have one subhole which can be placed on either the left or right hand. The following image shows it on the right.

By eliminating one of the subholes, 11-hole ocarinas retain much of the design flexibility of the 10-hole ocarina, but providing one subhole allows a semitone below the instrument's base note to be played. That note occurs in a lot of music.

Inline ocarinas

Inline ocarinas are essentially the same as transverse ocarinas and use an identical or near-identical fingering, with ten, eleven or twelve holes. However, the mouthpiece is placed on the end of the chamber, with the body held straight out in front of you, much like a recorder or whistle.

The inline design allows your hands to be held straight, which may put less stress on your wrists. They may be better if you have arthritis, RSI or other disabilities. However, inline ocarinas are much less standardised and are made by fewer makers.

The design also creates some unique challenges:

• Inline ocarinas can feel less stable, as all of the instrument's weight is aligned on a single line between the player's thumbs and lips. The transverse, by comparison, forms a stable triangular distribution of weight between the two thumbs and lips.
• If one scales up an inline to make a bass or contrabass ocarina, the centre of mass moves much further forward from the player than a comparable transverse. This makes the instrument more difficult to handle.
• As a maker, I have found the inline design acoustically problematic. In summary, placing the voicing at the end of the chamber tends to make these ocarinas more prone to screeching when blown at higher pressures.

Transverse multichamber ocarinas

The transverse multichamber ocarina is essentially a single chamber transverse, onto which one or more additional small ocarinas have been attached and tuned to play as a single instrument.

These multichamber ocarinas exist to provide a larger range of notes, as single chamber ocarinas can only sound a small range due to their physics. Sometimes, harmonies can be played between the chambers, but this is not their primary function.

Variations exist with two (double), three (triple) and rarely four (quad) chambers. The one shown below is a double. Each chamber in one of these instruments is entirely separate from the other chambers, having its own set of finger holes.

Unlike single chambers, multichamber ocarinas are classified by the number of chambers, and not by hole count. This is done, as the fingering system is not fully standardised and varies to some extent between makers.

Several tunings and fingering systems are used in multichamber ocarinas, which have various pros and cons and suit different kinds of music. Knowing the exact fingerings for any single multichamber ocarina requires reference to the manufacturer's fingering chart.

For more, see 'Multichamber ocarinas and their tuning systems' and 'The fingering systems of multichamber ocarinas'.

In addition to providing more range, multichamber transverse ocarinas also have a few other benefits:

• Splitting the range over multiple chambers reduces the range produced by each chamber and can improve tone quality.
• Most multichambered ocarinas only have one thumb hole, allowing the right thumb to just support the instrument.

Transverse double, triple, and quad ocarinas may be able to sound in harmony close to their chamber break. Ocarinas made by Giorgio Pacchioni, for instance, allow a small number of thirds, fourths, and fifths to be played in this way. See 'The fingering systems of multichamber ocarinas'.

Harmony ocarinas, which are explained later, are multichamber ocarinas that are designed to play in harmony. Due to their differing function, their design and ergonomics are quite different.

Pendant ocarinas (4, 5, and 6 hole ocarinas)

Pendant ocarinas, developed in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, are instruments that play an octave using four finger holes and a binary-like fingering system.

They can and have been used for skilled musical performance. However, they have many objective disadvantages relative to the transverse ocarina:

• The limited number of holes does not allow pendant ocarinas to be tuned as accurately as transverse ocarinas. This can be seen if you measure the breath curve of one. The player must compensate by irregularly raising or lowing blowing pressure.
• The fingering system frequently requires one hole to be closed, while opening another at the same time. It is thus easy to produce unintended 'chirps' if the holes are not opened and closed simultaneously.
• Some chromatic (sharp and flat) notes can only be played in tune, with a volume that balances with surrounding notes, by partially covering finger holes.

That being said, pendant ocarinas do have a few unique advantages over the transverse:

• They can be made much smaller than a transverse while remaining ergonomic to play. Thus, they can be designed to sound at a higher pitch, potentially opening up some unique musical possibilities.
• Being small, they can be worn as a pendant. They are great for spontaneous musical performances, as you can always have one with you.

It is also worth noting that the production quality of pendant ocarinas is quite variable between makers. They are often produced as novelty items and not properly tuned.

I do want to stress that while having fewer holes can intuitively seem more straight­forward, the pendant ocarina is no easier to play well than any other kind of ocarina. The player must know how to create expression, and like all ocarinas, their pitch is unstable, requiring much skill to play in tune.

Sculptural ocarinas

Sculptural ocarinas combine a playable ocarina, usually based on a transverse or pendant design, with a sculptural visual features. The two shown below were made by Oliver Gosselink and Ross Dubois.

These ocarinas can be visually stunning, but as serious musical instruments, sculptural ocarinas are complicated to discuss, as the visual design of a musical instrument is limited by several factors:

• The need for the player to hold and interact with the instrument (ergonomics).
• The acoustic constraints of producing a good sound.

In practice, optimising for playability imposes significant constraints on what can be done visually, and it is easy for a sculptural ocarina to put visual features in places that get in the way of a player, or use a body shape that harms sound quality.

Sculptural ocarinas exist on a spectrum between being primarily instruments and primarily art pieces. Unfortunately, differentiating between these falls entirely on you as the player, and understanding the factors that make an ocarina ergonomic, as well as the factors that make an ocarina work, is essential.

But in summary:

• Ocarinas designed primarily as musical instruments can be very playable. Visual features may be added with awareness of standard playing techniques, as well as the player's need to hold the instrument.
• Ones designed primarily for visuals can suffer in playability. An easy example is zoomorphic designs, ones designed to look like animals or birds. Animals did not evolve to be playable musical instruments.

It is often said that the shape of an ocarina isn't important, but in my experience, that is not true. Highly irregular shapes typically exhibit undesirable playing charac­teristics, such as where a small breath change causes pitch jumps. They can also be susseptible to airy high notes or screeching.

Additionally, sculptural ocarinas are priced higher due to their intricate visual design. How good they sound is orthogonal.

Zelda and media-inspired ocarinas

Today, there are many ocarinas on the market which are designed to replicate the ocarina featured in the video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Their quality varies enormously, with many being poorly made and not properly tuned.

Any ocarina designed to follow the instrument depicted in the Zelda games will have problems, because the game's ocarina is a visual prop that gives little concern to playability:

• The finger holes of the original are placed following the button layout of the Nintendo 64 controller and are not ergonomic to cover. Makers work around this by just adopting the transverse fingering system. However:
• The design is too rounded, which encourages fingers to slide off the body, making it feel unstable in the player's hands. 'Egg-shaped' ocarinas have poor ergonomics in general.
• They usually have airy high notes as the egg-shaped chamber and voicing design forced by the external shape is acoustically problematic. The shape prevents the use of a voicing neck, resulting in a large chamber volume for a given pitch.

This trend has also led to some manufacturers selling ocarinas which are inspired by other media franchises with varying, often poor, playability.

For anyone interested in playing the ocarina as a serious instrument, I strongly recommend avoiding Zelda and other media-inspired ocarinas entirely.

Xuns

The Xun, pronounced 'shoon', is a Chinese ocarina-like instrument that features a flute-like blowhole instead of a ducted voicing as found on the other designs listed here. I don't have much to say about them regarding serious playing, as they are functionally a different instrument, with their own playing tradition.

As a Chinese traditional instrument, little information is available about them in English. I have seen them with several fingering systems, one resembling the linear system of a 10-hole ocarina, and another with six holes that uses cross-fingerings. I don't know if they are intended to play within the Western 12-tone system or Chinese microtonal scales.

The flute-like blowhole may allow more control and expressive playing, but they are also quite difficult to get sound from. Like all vessel flutes, opening holes lets air escape, and producing clean high notes demands fine focusing of the airstream. It takes a lot of practice.

Microtonal ocarinas

The microtonal ocarina is a design of ocarina with one or two large holes, covered by the palm of your hand. They are played by varying your hand position and blowing pressure.

The microtonal ocarina has been refined recently by Wesley Hicks. His design somewhat resembles a transverse ocarina with the two ends cut off, leaving just a voicing and two large holes that are covered by the palms of your hands.

What are they capable of? A lot more than you probably expect.

They can play Western scales chromatically, or the scales of any other tradition if you wish. The only limit is your ability to hear the pitch in your mind and adjust to match it. With a microtonal ocarina, you absolutely have to listen.

This design also allows for enormous control over both pitch and sound volume, as you can blow softly with more of the holes open, or blow hard and slightly close the holes to maintain the same pitch at a higher volume. It is much more intuitive to do than on a transverse.

I consider them excellent teaching tools as they force you to hear the pitch you want to produce and adjust your hands accordingly. They are also great for exploring the sound of arbitrary pitches over a drone, allowing you to rediscover unisons, thirds, and fifths.

The microtonal ocarina also offers an accurate visual representation of the skill required to play any type of ocarina well. Having fixed finger holes can lead you to assume 'if I'm using the right fingering, I'm playing the right note', which isn't the case.

Harmony ocarinas

Harmony ocarinas are multichambers that are designed and tuned to play in harmony with themselves. They typically consist of two chambers, each of which is played by a different hand.

Unlike multichamber transverse ocarinas, the base pitches of the two chambers are tuned in unison or with a small interval like a third or fifth. Each chamber is played by a different hand, allowing different notes to be fingered, creating harmony.

These instruments can sound wonderful in the right setting; however, design challenges and the limited number of available fingers mean that these instruments are quite technically limited.

Harmony ocarinas are also not standardised at all. The chambers may be positioned side by side, similar to an inline ocarina, or physically separated, joined by external ducting. Fingerings and tuning also vary a lot between makers.

The following gives some general advice, but if you would like to explore harmony ocarinas, your best bet is to look for manufacturers and read their documentation.

Tuning

Harmony ocarinas are tuned using one of two approaches:

• Tuning all of the notes to sound at the same pressure allows for arbitrary notes to be fingered, but higher notes will tend to sound airy.
• Alternately, tuning with an identical pressure curve allows the instrument to produce a clean tone, but can only play in harmony at a fixed interval, using identical fingerings on both chambers.

These trade-offs arise because, as finger holes are opened, air can escape. The player must blow harder, or the sound gets more and more airy. This is a problem for designing harmony ocarinas because, ideally, different chambers need to be blown at different pressures, and people only have one mouth.

This is also why most harmony ocarinas use a rectangular sound hole, as they can sound at the same pressure over a larger range without becoming airy.

Fingerings

As noted, the fingering systems of harmony ocarinas typically assign one hand to one chamber. This allows them to be played independently, but is also limiting, as fewer fingers are available for each chamber. There are two different approaches: linear and cross-fingered.

Linear

A linear fingering system, where each finger is assigned to a note sequentially, means that only about six notes can be played on each chamber. The example below depicts such a fingering with the chambers tuned at an interval of a fifth. The chambers have identical fingerings, but sound different notes. 1, 2, 3, 4 and T are the fingers: pinky, ring, middle, index, and thumb.

Left hand

Right hand

Cross fingered

Some harmony ocarinas utilise a variation of the pendant fingering system, arranged linearly for four fingers of each hand. With this system, each chamber can attain a range of about an octave, at the cost of tuning accuracy.

The example fingering below demonstrates an ocarina with two chambers tuned to the same base pitch, so using the same fingering on both chambers would sound the same note. Ocarinas using this system may also be tuned with the chambers at a different base interval, like the previous example with linear fingering.

Huaccas

The Huacca, pronounced 'waka', is a vessel flute with multiple chambers tuned to play in harmony. It is similar to a harmony ocarina, but the term 'huacca' refers to a specific design that is relatively standardised. It is worth using this term to to avoid confusion.

Huaccas have two or three globular chambers, either arranged side by side or in a triangle, and windways combined into one for the player to blow. On most of the ones I have seen, the base pitches of the chambers are tuned in unison.

On two chamber instruments, both chambers have finger holes. On ones with three chambers, the third chamber is a drone tuned to play one continuous pitch.