The 7th edition of the event “Viver a Cultura @ Técnico Taguspark” took place on 9th January and included a saxophone musical session by the Técnico students and members of TMIST, Gonçalo Jesus and Vasco Vaz.

The session consisted of a talk interspersed with musical performances. The Técnico students shared some tips to improve saxophone techniques: how to hold the instrument, how it should be tuned, how to play the same note, and how to clean it. The students performed individually some songs such as “Take Five” and “Take me to church”, and performed together the songs “He’s a Pirate” and “Guilty of being innocent”. Gonçalo Jesus played the classic “Pequeña Czarda” (Little Dance) at the end of the session, which was strongly applauded.

The audience could learn about the history of the saxophone, when it was created (1851), how it came from the clarinet and how it works. In order to show how hard it is to play this instrument, the students asked for volunteers to blow into the saxophone mouthpiece. The audience became aware of the difficulty volunteers had in creating a sound and understood that it is not just the vibration of air that creates sound, but the vibration of a piece of wood attached to the mouthpiece, called the reed. The frequency at which the reed starts to vibrate depends on a specific mouth placement.

The students showed several saxophones with different sizes and sounds, as well as photographs of record-breaking saxophones, such as the highest-pitched saxophone, called the soprano saxophone, and explained that the sound varies according to the distance the air travels inside the instrument, generating higher and lower notes and that is why larger saxophones produce lower sounds and vice versa.