source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 07:39:40 -0800 Subject: Re: Sympathetic Vibrations From: Paul Hahn On Wed, 26 Feb 1997, Lydia Ayers wrote: > >Yes, but tubes present orders of magnitude more surface area to be acted > >upon by sound pressure than strings do. > > Yes, they do have more surface area, and they could even be seaid to > contain their own resonators, since they are hollow. But, even so, > it is the air that carries the vibrations which stimulatie the > sympathetic vibrations, not a sounding board connected to the > original stimulus and not cables or anything else. Nobody was questioning that air could transmit vibrations--that's what sound is, after all. The original question was _can a string be set into significant vibrating motion by air vibrations alone?_ Examples involving tubes, or strings mechanically coupled to soundboards or other strings, do not help resolve this question. A simple experiment that _would_ resolve the question is this: sing at an electric guitar at a pitch matching one of the strings. Note the level of the output and compare vs. a gentle pluck. I'll bet it's several orders of magnitude (bels) lower. Surely someone out there has an electric guitar handy? --pH (manynote@library.wustl.edu or http://library.wustl.edu/~manynote) O /\ "Do you like to gamble, Eddie? -\-\-- o Gamble money on pool games?" Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 27 Feb 1997 17:31 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA24992; Thu, 27 Feb 1997 17:31:48 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA24881 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id IAA07680; Thu, 27 Feb 1997 08:29:37 -0800 Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 08:29:37 -0800 Message-Id: <009B085B103EC319.453A@vbv40.ezh.nl> Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu