Cool Jazz -- at Minus 321 Fahrenheit
Musicians give baseball players a run for their money when it comes to superstitions and folk beliefs. In recent years, brass players have been buzzing about how supercooling their horns with liquid nitrogen makes them… supercool. A new scientific study pours cold water on this notion.

A recent article in the New York Times reports that an engineering professor at Tufts University tried to document whether the deep-freezing and thawing actually changes an instrument's tone, as some musicians have claimed.

Dr. Chris Rogers' experiments, funded by instrument maker Selmer, involved treating trumpets with liquid nitrogen, thawing them out, and giving them blind tone tests. Neither the trumpeters nor their test audiences knew which instruments had been frost-bitten. The results: insignificant differences between the listeners' ratings of horns that had and had not been cold-treated.

Rogers points out that musicians, like everyone else, are subject to a placebo effect -- believe that a treatment has an effect, and it just might. Perhaps the apparent value of deep-freezing to horn players was due only to their belief that they were playing a horn that had been treated with frosty fairy dust.

Read the New York Times article [fee required]

Read about the research in the Tufts University eNews, which includes a link to CBC Radio audio ("As it Happens" article)

Visit researcher Chris Rogers at his home page

Read about the Selmer Vincent Bach Stradivarius line

See more discussion, alternative points of view, and a demonstration of freezing a tuba at American Band Instrument Service

Take a virtual factory tour at Powell Flutes, whose owner is still experimenting with cryogenics