[CAUT] Anechoic chamber - experiments

[Ed Sutton]

Perhaps you can do some mapping of octaves, in particular to see if there are vectors along which coincident partials beat with more or less amplitude, or, if you will, vectors for beatless octaves. 
Same could be done for other intervals.
Like Don says, record what you find.
Ed Sutton
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jim Busby 
  To: caut at ptg.org 
  Sent: Friday, June 18, 2010 2:12 PM
  Subject: [CAUT] Anechoic chamber - experiments


  All,

   

  The last 3 days we've had a C7 in BYU's anechoic chamber doing some studies on how sound comes out of a piano (direction, mapping everything, etc.) and some very interesting things are coming of it. (More later) But the exciting thing is that the head physicist is a decent pianist and after moving the C7 into the chamber Keith tuned it and voiced a few notes. The fellow said "Wow! what you just did made some big differences in the spectrum of that note. Do you think we could do some studies on piano voicing, and maybe other things related to pianos???"

   

  Now I'm jumping up and down..

   

  So, Yamaha is sending us a C7 Disklavier so that repeatability is not an issue, and we will have a film crew documenting it all. This is now a go, and not speculative, as some of our other potential studies have been. It is slated for Fall semester.

   

  If any of you have ideas of things you might like to see studied, please let me or Keith know. We will have the piano in the chamber for one week. I haven't started to compile my list yet, but it might be fairly extensive and include what happens with needle placement, different kinds of "alternative" voicing methods, different hammer spectrums, etc. Then, we'll sit down with the scientists,  narrow things down, choose, and watch them do their thing. It's a very exciting time!

   

  These folks are also very grateful for our help, and the microscope studies are also a go. Apparently that's no big deal, but this anechoic chamber stuff is. They are creating "acoustic maps" of many instruments in a way that has never been done. 3D stuff or some new thing. I'll find out more as I go.

   

  Jim Busby BYU
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