ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how to make flame sing. The flame rapidly heats the air in its immediate vicinity, causing it to expand. The rapid expansion creates a pressure wave which travels to the end of the tube and partially reflects back, just as in an open-ended organ pipe. With the flame organ it is the oscillation in flame intensity and the resulting localized expansion and contraction of the air that provides the initial impulse. The sounds of such an arrangement according to people who have worked with flame tones are highly varied. The system can be refined so as to dependably produce clear, steady tones at the frequency of the tube’s fundamental. Or the mechanism can be adjusted to bring out harmonics. References to fire music generally take Kastner’s pyrophone as a starting point. The chapter describes three more fire organs, created by contemporary artists-in-fire.
