[CAUT] Anechoic chamber - experiments

[ed440 at mindspring.com]

Jim-

That's not my question.
If you play a major third and move your head around, it may beat very clearly in one place and very little in another.
Thus I am thinking of the ongoing argument about "beatless" octaves. Perhaps the beating varies depending on the location of the listening ear. If so, this should be fairly easy to detect in an anechoic chamber with the equipment you describe. This might explain why one person hears an octave as beatless and another person hears beats.
The best octaves to test would be mid-range octaves, where the inharmonicity is fairly well matched, not the extreme bass octaves.
Don't re-tune the octave, move the microphone to a new location.

Ed S.

-----Original Message-----
>From: Jim Busby <jim_busby at byu.edu>
>Sent: Jun 18, 2010 6:14 PM
>To: Ed Sutton <ed440 at mindspring.com>, "caut at ptg.org" <caut at ptg.org>
>Subject: RE: [CAUT] Anechoic chamber - experiments
>
>Hi Ed,
>
>Rick Baldassin's book "On Pitch" has references to these but Rick told me that these were "not very scientific studies". Chris Robinson told me that he and Rick did these studies years ago and that they didn't save the studies. So, you're right. How much of the fundamental do we really hear at C1? Are Rick's graphs accurate? And I've always wanted to see how much a supposedly identical unison varies at the different partials. (Why no unison can be tuned perfectly pure...)
>
>Thanks.
>Jim
>
>
>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