If you drill down into the area for Instruments, then Woodwind Instruments, then Oboe, at the bottom of the page you will find a link to an article written by none other than Phil Freihofner!
My goal was an overview, with links and references provided for every statement. I discovered that it's one thing to know something, and quite another to be able to cite the source of that knowledge! I had to spend many hours in the UCB libraries, retracing my steps from as far back as twenty-five years ago.
My favorite takeaway: did you know that the combined length of the bore and reed of an oboe is significantly shorter than the distance that would account for a given frequency and the speed of sound in air? A straight-forwardl calculation put the end of the air column somewhere near the back of an oboist's throat!
Julius Nederveen answers this, showing that the actions of the reed present a wave pattern to the rest of the air column that appears to be the equivalent of the unaccounted bore. If he were writing today instead of in 1969, he might say the reed functions as a "virtual" bore.
As is often the case, one answer leads to further questions. I have some thoughts as well as questions about the implication of the virtual bore concept as it might affect reed-making. But it seemed best to keep speculations out of a review article emphasizing citable facts, and to present them in blog form, instead.
