ts = tenor saxophone.
Saxophone: musical instrument consisting of a conical (2.5 degrees) brass tube with clarinette-like single-reed mouthpiece
(therefore, "woodwind" instrument; but why are musical instruments not classified in terms of musical characteristics?).
Toneholes are remote-controlled from anatomically optimal finger positions via a lever system ("ergonomical user interface").

Design problems:
some arkward mechanical engineering,
mid-18hundredths sewing machine mechanics.
Obsolete materials (tree barks and animal skins) can be replaced by modern materials like neoprene from diving wet suits or rubber from car engine oil filters to improve mouth piece and octave valve seals).

What about doing the whole thing in stainless steel, or titanium? (at least some parts like mouthpieces and ligatures are indeed commercially available). There is a myth among musicians that construction material affects sound a lot, even in wind instruments. Sax himself did not believe in these myths (which does unfortunately not imply proof).

Scavone PhD thesis, Stanford University, 1997

Excellent explanation (for physicists and maybe musicians) of how a sax works (U New South Wales)

Relation between saxophone playing and atmospheric dynamics:
         Non-linear wave excitation!
         The excitation of different wave modes, including solitary wave modes, is unstable (mode hopping).
         However, an experienced saxophone player learns to selectively excite the desired modes. This is possible because of a feed-back loop involving the musician's nervous system.
         In the atmosphere, wave excitation is still widely unexplored in detail. Only certain wave modes are taken into account in wave excitation modelling. However, mode hopping may be expected to be important and contribute considerably to chaotic behaviour in atmospheric dynamics.

Other relations between music and (space, atmospheric, solar-terrestrial) science:
N.A.S.A. - North American Saxophone Association
J.A.T.P. -  Jazz At The Philharmonic. JATP was the earlier nam of the journal JASTP.
J.G.R.   - Juan G. Roederer, author of the book "Introduction to the Physics and Psychophysics of Music".
year 1842 - Saxophone and Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt) born
Michael E. McIntyre -  our colleague at Cambridge (UK), violinist and expert on the clarinet mouthpiece and many other things, who, among many other things, writes a book about "Lucidity, Science, and Music". ( Recommended reading, especially for musicians).
Les Hatton's interesting web site - a mathematician, meterologist, geophysicist, software forensics expert, and a classical and Blues guitarrist. Don't miss his impressive work on software reliability!
... and the relation between music and astronomy is known since antiquity, Kepler's days, and, more recently,
.... Queen's Dr. Brian May is a living link between music and interplanetary dust (well, it's partially interstellar!)...