Why does your music sound off?

2 minute(s) de lecture

🎐 The short answer

A few days ago, a friend asked me this question after listening to my playing:

“Is the hitoyogiri that hard to play? Some of your notes sounded a bit off…is it normal?”

A precious — and inspiring — remark that made me want to write this article.

To answer it clearly, I’d like to break the question into two parts:

Imagine you’re trying to capture a landscape.

With a recorder, it’s like using a camera in auto mode: you frame the shot, press the button, click, and the picture is sharp. On the recorder, all you need to do is cover the right holes, and the note comes out clean, well-pitched — “guaranteed.”
With a hitoyogiri (or a shakuhachi), you’re painting that same landscape by hand, with a brush. You have to choose the angle, the pressure, the thickness of each stroke. In flute terms: every note must be shaped — with your breath, your lips, your fingers, your posture. There’s no automatic note — every sound is “handmade”.

A recorder has a built-in fipple — like a wind tunnel that channels your breath in a precise way. The instrument handles the basic tone production for you.
The hitoyogiri has no fipple. You blow across a sharp edge, like blowing across the rim of a bottle. A slight change in angle, air pressure, or lip tension can shift the note — sometimes by a quarter tone.

🎵 In short: the modern ear craves fixed points. The hitoyogiri offers a shifting landscape.

A modern recorder typically has absolute pitch, meaning it is tuned to a standardized reference—usually A = 440 Hz (hertz). This allows it to play in tune with other modern instruments in ensembles or orchestras.
The hitoyogiri, by contrast, is tuned using relative pitch. Each flute is handmade, and its pitch can vary—sometimes by as much as a quarter tone—depending on the individual maker, player, and historical tradition. The scale it uses was not based on modern standardized measurements, but rather on tuning by ear, often tailored to vocal styles or regional aesthetics. As a result, no two hitoyogiri flutes sound exactly alike, and they often don’t align perfectly with modern Western tuning systems.

The hitoyogiri forgives nothing. A breath too strong, lips too tight, a slightly wrong angle… and the sound slips away, or veers sharply.

And yet, that’s exactly what draws me to it.
In that instability, a kind of truthful expression emerges.

In a way, I’m not trying to play “perfectly in tune” —
I’m trying to meet the moment as it is, fluid and alive.
…perfectly imperfect.