The Logic Off Topic list

Thoughts from the mind of Murray McDowall, 22-11-2001:

>  >Uhm... am I supposed to now go read that article?  Don't suppose they
>  >have a 30 year old article online, do they? :-)
>
>Probably not ;-)

Thought so...

>I find Scientific American in most decent libraries but I am in Australia.

Well, they have it over here as well, although I doubt they have a 
30-year back-log...

>I have played trumpet myself and I thought it was an interesting article.
>Actually, there was a series of such articles in Sci.American over a decade
>including articles on the physics of the piano, bells and the violin. I
>found them better than what is on a lot of books on the physics of 
>instruments.

Next time I'm in the library, I'll check to see how far back they go. 
Thanks for the tip.

>I was merely adding a clarification -- just pointing out that the 
>notes are not pure harmonics as is often assumed.

Ah, OK.

>The set of harmonics sounding is peculiar to each note on the series and the
>ratio of their amplitudes would obviously have a lot to do with the tone of
>the player/instrument.

Probably the same mechanism that's at work when playing overtones on 
e.g. a saxophone: some people make these sound beautiful, while 
others only manage to get a squeaky kind of sound.

>From memory, the article explains that the bell reflects sound waves back
>toward the mouthpiece and thus it supports the establishment of standing
>waves inside the instrument. The sound that leaks out the bell to the
>audience is a treble-boosted version of what is sounding inside.

This "sound that leaks out the bell to the audience" -- induces a 
rather nasty picture in my mind.  Leaking sounds... yuck... :-)

>It also points out that the valveless clarino trumpet of baroque music had
>harmonics which could be bent around quite a bit -- they weren't nearly so
>centred on a pitch as those of modern horns and this property made it
>possible to play notes with them which -- strictly speaking  -- aren't in
>the harmonic series. It was also twice as long as a modern trumpet --  more
>like a trombone in length  -- so that a lot of the parts written for it
>were full of notes in the octave between the 8th and 16th harmonics.

Wow, this is very interesting stuff indeed.  I didn't know all that. 
Thanks for sharing this info.

cheers,
HJ
-- 
Hendrik Jan Veenstra  <h@...>
Omega Art: http://www.ision.nl/users/h/index.html