Michael Prairie’s passion for the flute began in the late 1990’s when he encountered the Native American-style flute at a craft show. Before buying one he tried his wife’s old recorder, but all it seemed to do was squeal. Discouraged, he decided not to buy a flute (note that he didn’t discovered the thumb hole on the recorder until years later!). In 2001 he attended Musical Echoes where Butch Hall was selling flute kits for $20. He bought one, built the kit that night, and proceeded to get hooked.

Being a woodworker already, he started making his own flutes with advice from flute makers who were generous with their knowledge in the old NativeFluteWoodWorking Yahoo! Group. Exploring the overblow notes in the second register, he found them to be mostly out of tune, and this inspired him to begin studying the acoustics of the flute to see if he could fix that. As an electrical engineer he found that flute acoustics and electrical transmission line systems share much of the same mathematics if you swap voltage and current with pressure and air flow, so he started learning as much as he could about how the sound was made and how the notes were tuned. As he learned how the design elements of the flute affected the pitch and voice of different flutes, he began to share those ideas with the flute making community that was so generous when he began his journey.

Along the way he encountered other types of flutes. Geoffrey Ellis asked about the breath holes in the northern Chinese xiao, which began a side trip on the journey. on that spur of the trail he met Gary Stroutsos who reinforced the appeal of the xiao and kindled curiosity in the ancient rim-blown flutes of the desert southwest. Later, Peter Phippen would lead him to a deeper interest in the 1500-year-old rim-blown flutes from Canyon de Chelly and then turn his attention to the Japanese shakuhachi. There were other flutes as well, and with each one he would build and experiment with their design to see how they worked and how they were different from the others.

At first his flutes were prototypes that explored various aspects of the theories he was learning, all in the pursuit of making the “perfect flute.” It didn’t take too long to find that there was no such thing, and he eventually relaxed his modern expectations and really started appreciating the looks and sound of older flutes. He still continues to pursue technical aspects of the flute like how the warble works, but he recently started making replicas of old flutes to learn what they have to teach.

One of the things that caught his eye was the aesthetic of many of the older Indigenous flutes that had even hole spacing, and was intrigued by the tunings that such an intuitive pattern could produce. The warble often accompanied the old even-holed flutes, and he had an interest in the acoustics of the warble from some research he began around 2010. At first, he looked at both the warble and the tunings from a technical acoustics approach and was able to optimize some calculations to get a good scale (close to the western intervals most of us are used to). He was able to get a couple of the flutes to warble as well, thanks to a recipe that Robert Gatliff published in FluteTree.org.

On the technical side of old flutes, he was able to convince a student to work with him on the acoustics of the warble while he was still teaching at the university. He had been studying the warble on and off for 12 years by then, and had come up with a hypothesis on what was going on with the warble. Having help in the lab to gather enough data to test that idea, and in 2023 they presented their findings at a session on Acoustics of Indigenous Musical instruments at a conference in Sydney, Australia.

He retired from his day job in 2023 after careers in the US Air Force, industry, and academia to pursue flute making and other creative endeavors that had been put on hold. These days, his flute making is focused on a more traditional style of flutes. He recognizes that there are already a lot of excellent flute makers making modern interpretations of Native American-style and rim-blown flutes, but he feels a need to support awareness of some of the traditional flute design aesthetics from which the modern flute has become.  

Photo credit: Darlene Lizarraga, AZ State Museum, 2019