| # | Date Added | Category | Summary | Details | Status |
| 1 | 15-Dec-2025 | Conical Bore Design | Coiled bore design to make smaller chanters in the same pitch | Develop a coiled bore to make a concert D chanter with an arbitrarily small hole separation | Starting field testing with a five year old beginner. Sourced budget bag and bellows. Explained the approach in a YouTube video, see https://westwellbagpipes.com/evolution-of-the-chanter-for-young-learners/ |
| 2 | 15-Dec-2025 | Conical Bore Design | Coiled bore design to make lower pitch chanters with the same hole separation | Develop a coiled bore design to make useful instruments that are the equivalent of cor anglais, bassoon and contrabassoon, pitched up to two octaves below the concert D chanter in keys G, D, G,, D,, | Working prototypes completed one and two octaves below concert D, using bassoon and contrabassoon reeds respectively. |
| 3 | 15-Dec-2025 | Semitone keys | Ergonomic keys to play the chanter in any key | Design and make semitone keys that sit under the player’s fingers naturally when holding the chanter with a standard grip. | Still in development but playable instruments already in use and published on YouTube. Currently developing version 6 of the key system, where the aim is to build a chanter that feels identical in the hands to a keyless chanter. |
| 4 | 15-Dec-2025 | Chanter reeds | The effect of the scrape on the crow | How scraping the reeds in different ways affects the harmonic frequency spectrum when the reed is “crowed” (with no instrument attached). Uses Fourier analysis to analyse the generated harmonics | Setup work done and early results and charts available |
| 5 | 15-Dec-2025 | Chanter reeds | Observing the effect when crow frequency spectrum and instrument impedance spectrum are combined | What is the effect when a reed with a given crow is attached to an instrument with a given impedance spectrum (measured using BIAS: https://www.artim.at/en/bias-overview/#) ? | Initial tests run using OpenCLAW and Claude for agentic AI comparison of Fourier analysis of the reed’s crow with the Fourier analysis of the sound wave when attached to the instrument. |
| 6 | 15-Dec-2025 | Chanter reeds | Feature engineering and linear regression techniques to discover key reed features | Machine learning techniques applied to large datasets, including feature engineering to discover which features contribute most significantly to tone and playability between reed and instrument | Initial tests run using OpenCLAW and Claude for agentic AI comparison of Fourier analysis of the reed’s crow with the Fourier analysis of the sound wave when attached to the instrument. |
| 7 | 15-Dec-2025 | Chanter reeds | Mathematics of mechanical vibrations | Understanding the mathematics of mechanical vibrations and whether a double reed can be approximated as a large number of thin bars, to help understand how to manufacture better reeds or solve common reed problems | In progress |
| 8 | 15-Dec-2025 | Chanter reeds | Mechanical testing of reeds | Find out if there is a way to test a reed mechanically, for example using gauges to test springiness, to establish “goodness” of the reed for a basic level | Some equipment available and early tests designed |
| 9 | 15-Dec-2025 | Chanter reeds | Reeds for lower pitched instruments | How to make reeds for the longer coiled instruments (described above) where an instrument with those dimensions has never been made before | Not started. Currently using bassoon and contrabasson reeds in the instruments Acquired a bassoon in Mar 2026 to compare frequency spectra and reed behaviour |
| 10 | 15-Dec-2025 | Instrument bores | Impedance spectrum of instruments | measuring the actual impedance spectrum of an instrument using the BIAS hardware and software https://www.artim.at/en/bias-overview/# compare predicted with actual. | In progress. Made enquires about acquiring latest version of BIAS for woodwind: https://www.artim.at/bias_woodwinds/ when available in June 2026 |
| 11 | 15-Dec-2025 | Effect of other parts of instrument | Effect on sound of the area above the reed | The effect of the shape of the chamber above the reed, between the reed and the bag | Not started. Have early results from drones, but methodical tests still to be designed |
| 12 | 15-Dec-2025 | Drone reeds | Prediction of ideal drone reed construction for a given bore | Whether an ideal drone reed construction (size of drone, length and Young’s modulus) can be predicted for a drone bore of a given length | Not started. Have the measuring equipment to test stiffness |