PPDP

=Personal Professional Development Plan=

The music, technology education and art field will find this project of value to them. Each cycle will have time to focus students on this endeavor in a ongoing project that the students will be able to take pride in knowing they accomplished a functional musical instrument that //__they__//(the student) made themselves.
 * Who will find this endeavor of value or significant? **

It will be an excellent way to start a collaboration between the various fields in our building as there is currently little to no active communication between us now due to no project similarities.
 * In what ways will the stakeholders find this endeavor to be of use or significant? **

In my particular field students will be learning about the technological aspects that have gone into and the ongoing transformation of how technology shapes music.
 * How or in what ways will this be of use or of value? **

Describe the overall project: ·  Students will be involved in the creation of a musical instrument (flute) from simple PVC (schedule 40) pipe. ·  Students will be responsible for the safe well being of themselves and others in the class during their time working on the machinery.
 * __ GOALS: __**

Describe the final product: ·  Each will be approximately eighteen inches of PVC schedule 40 pipe. ·  There will be seven drilled holes using one quarter inch drill bit. o  4 15/16” o  6 1/8” o  7 13/16” o  9 ¾” o  10 11/16” o  14 5/16” o  15 1/16” ·  Will have a Beeswax plug / Other. Methods under testing.

Objectives: What will you be able to do at the end of this project that you cannot do now? 1: Students will now have the ability to create a musical instrument with the purpose of being able to design, build, make aesthetically pleasing by their own standards and, apply said instrument in a real musical setting.

__ ·  The following plans will be revised for classroom purposes but most accurately depicts what I had been planning on. Due to my lack of musical nature the work has been done on several research sites as to the spacing needed to create a musical instrument. __ These instructions will be brief, but I think adequate to make a duplicate of my flute. There is room to vary certain parts of it, but for simplicity, lets stick to these measurements:
 * How will the objectives be achieved? **
 * __(Due to the nature of the project and for paperwork purposes, I found the briefest set of directions to keep it simple for anyone to follow along and have some idea.)__**

Start with a scrap of 3/4" PVC pipe (schedule 40) that is 18 inches long. I will refer to the "top" of the flute (where your mouth goes) and the "bottom" (the end away from you). All holes in the flute should be drilled with a 1/4" bit. I make marks along the side of the pipe that has writing printed on it to keep my holes straight.

From the bottom, measure up the flute and drill 7 holes centered on these measurements: The first five measurements are for the "five-hole" flute. The last two measurements are used to make the whistle.
 * 4-15/16"
 * 6-1/8"
 * 7-13/16"
 * 9-3/4"
 * 10-11/16"
 * 14-5/16"
 * 15-1/16"

Now the tricky part is to make a good whistle. First you need to cut a channel between holes #1 and #2 (from the top of the flute). So you are making a 1/4" wide channel on the surface of the PVC between those two holes. The channel should only be about 1/16" deep, so you are not cutting all the way through the PVC. Later you will wrap a piece of paper over the channel to contain the air as it comes up out of the first hole, runs through the channel and splits on the whistle of the second hole. I have carved this channel with sharp tools, but it is dangerous and difficult. A Dremel tool with a selection of cutting and abrading tips makes the job much easier.

The second hole was drilled straight in at first, but now you need to go back and cut it at an angle on the downwind side of the hole, so that air coming through the channel will split on the sharp edge, with half the air going down and half the air going up. You can tilt the drill at an angle to cut away the plastic inside the hole. But try not to eat away at the upwind side of that hole, as you want to keep the 90 degree edge there. Again, the Dremel tool makes the job a lot easier. You can take just a little bit off the top edge of the hole (downwind side), but most of the angle should be achieved by carving off the bottom edge, inside the flute. I fear that this sounds confusing, but I don't know how else to explain it without pictures.

Anyway, the next step is to pour a beeswax plug in between those first two holes. I use a 3/4" dowel with tape wrapped once around the end to thicken it a little, and push it up through the bottom of the flute until it has just barely plugged hole number two from the top (the whistle). If you pour melted beeswax into the top of the flute then it will form a plug between holes number one and two, forcing the air up out of hole one, through the channel to split on the whistle of hole number two. Allow the wax to cool thoroughly before removing the dowel. Look through the flute to make sure the wax doesn't pull away from the inside of the pipe to allow air past it. Sometimes that happens and you have to redo the wax.

Now you are ready to test the flute. Wrap a piece of paper over hole number one and the channel, so that the air can still split on hole number two. Tie a string around the paper and flute to keep the paper in place. Blow through the flute with and without fingering the holes to see what happens. The rest is experimentation, as you try adjusting the angle of the whistle or the size and shape of the channel until you get a good sound on all the holes. I have spent hours fine-tuning flutes that way in the past, though I am faster at it now.

When you get it just the way you like it, then you can finish the flute with paint. Rub it all down with coarse sand paper to give the paint more texture to grab on to, and round out the top and bottom ends of the flute. Finally paint it with a couple coats of acrylic paints. I pound a large nail into a board to hold the flute up while the paint is drying. I lay a pencil beside the nail to lift the bottom end of the flute up a little bit, so that the only painted part in contact with anything is the bit resting on the pencil. When it is dry then you can put the paper and string back on and play to your heart's content. The layer of paint may slightly alter the sound though, so it could require some precise fine-tuning.

Well, by the end students will have a flute that sounds fairly appealing…..or a train whistle that we should run from. I’m not sure yet, we will have to find out.
 * (How will we measure success and how will it be documented? What does proficient success look like?) **