source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 25 Feb 1997 15:31:56 -0800 Subject: Sympathetic Vibrations From: Lydia Ayers This is a second attempt to post to the list in response to posts in January about sympathetic vibrations (I'm trying to catch up with a lot of old tuning posts): >> I believe that sympathetic strings do indeed work by transferring >> the energy through the air. As a simple experiment, sing into a string >> on a guitar, and you can easily set the string to vibrating >> (sympathetically) with your voice. > In that particular case I'm almost certain that what gets the guitar >string to vibrate is the sound waves from your voice vibrating the >soundboard, which vibrates the strings. FAR less, I believe you'll find is >a result of the air directly exciting the strings themselves. The justly-tuned aluminum tubes of my Woodstock Gamelan will vibrate sympathetically whenever a pitch is soundeded at the same frequency as one or more of them. This works not only when pitches are played on the flute or sung, but even when I cough! Coughing gets quite a few of the tubes to sound, and sometimes even when the cough is in a different room! There is no sounding board on the "gamelan," so this phenomenon is definitely transmitted through the air directly to the tubes. An interesting feature of sympathetic vibrations in strings or tubes is that they lack the characteristic attack, and often have timbres closer to sine waves than the timbres produced by "normal" playing techniques, such as struck, plucked or bowed. Lydia Ayers Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Wed, 26 Feb 1997 00:50 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA21507; Wed, 26 Feb 1997 00:50:31 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA21481 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id PAA12247; Tue, 25 Feb 1997 15:45:22 -0800 Date: Tue, 25 Feb 1997 15:45:22 -0800 Message-Id: <199702252342.PAA11882@ella.mills.edu> Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu