An Embouchure Aid for Wind Musicians

Giuseppe Sapienza

Name: Giuseppe Sapienza Main Subject: Classical Clarinet Research Supervisor: Wouter Verschuren Title of the Research: An Embouchure Aid for Wind Musicians Research Question: Assessing whether playing a wind instrument can change tooth position and investigate the effectiveness of an embouchure support device to provide dental support. This study was inspired by the author's personal experience of discomfort and pain while playing the clarinet and aims to investigate the potential relationship between dental health and clarinet playing, specifically the impact of the mouthpiece on tooth position and stability. A literature review of previous studies on the connection between wind instruments and tooth movement was conducted. The author collaborated with two professional dentists to develop an embouchure support device called PlayAid. The device was prototyped and tested by the author with a positive outcome. The study found a correlation between playing the clarinet and an increased risk of dental problems, including tooth mobility, erosion, and discomfort. The upper incisors were the most commonly affected teeth. The literature review showed that playing wind instruments can cause changes in tooth position, specifically an increase in overjet. Based on the results of this study, it can be concluded that an embouchure support device, like PlayAid, can effectively provide dental support for players with dental problems but also for those who exclusively seek better embouchure comfort and sound quality. The chosen format of a presentation will be a public exposition of the results of the research with a live demonstration of PlayAid.

In Conclusion

PlayAid's journey has just begun but the steps I went through would already deserve a book on its own. This experience taught me how important it is to reach out to your aspirations. To hunt down your goals and achieve what YOU desire the most. As classical musicians, we are often obliged to tick an endless list of boxes, to comply with traditional standards that often become a limit to our own view of the world. We go through the masters programme with the expectation to be ready for the professional world, but are we trained to recognise all the opportunities out there?

The study years are the perfect time to mark your bravery and your search for quests and to build disdain for defeat. The right time to think outside of the box. You may fail sometimes, but you will also learn to succeed in fields that you didn't know you were good at. Don't be afraid to ask for what you want, because most of the time people are inclined to help, they just don't know what you need.

This drive cannot always come from within yourself. At this young age, we are inexperienced and naturally afraid, we all need a wise person to look up to, a model. The role of an educational institution should be to feed human curiosity, open new doors and offer a 360° advancement of a person in every field, and guarantee a 100% success rate for its students. It should reinterpret the harsh lines we are forced to reflect, and it should connect the students with everyday practice. Include other art forms inside classical musicians' lives as a mean of expression, integrate more performance-based practices and create dynamism with other people to finally change society. Make art more accessible and take it out of concert halls and museums. Make the students themselves go out there and hunt all opportunities there are, make them work with their fantasy, rather than waiting for the call. But they'd have to know how to do that! Having a good tutor should not be a privilege, although, I still think I was really lucky for how things went during my Master's Programme. I was keen on pushing myself out there but without the expert supervision of Wouter Verschuren, I would have not thought about looking so far. Not everyone can boast of this privilege.

Creating a health product is challenging. I often wondered if I was the only one having this problem, or if I'm just making a big deal out of nothing as if I were looking through a microscope. But this research showed me that even though I haven't found yet, another person with the same problem, there is documentation of many musicians with dental disorders, meaning that I simply have to look in the right place.

Now I have gained more knowledge, a cooperative team, and defined the next phases of my project. This is the first victory of many more to come.

What remains now is to continue on this path. The outcomes are uncertain, but isn't this the right time to try and make mistakes?

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