At 9:08 AM -0800 12/5/01, Delwin D Fandrich wrote: >If I recall, you were saying 'sound' travels through the wood. Sound is >waves, but it's not the same thing. > >Or, did I misunderstand what you wrote? Probably not, because rightly or wrongly I was referring to as sound the waves created by the string, whereas properly speaking, sound is, I suppose, what reaches our ears through the air as a compression wave produced mainly by the excursions of the soundboard. I think there will be no argument that the impact of the hammer against the string does not constitute sound, but the complex transverse, lateral (never mind also lengthwise) and mixed motions of the string, which themselves are audible to some extent, constitute the 'sound' that is eventually to be emitted in a more audible and somewhat modified form into a body of air. I'd see it as a moot point whether you refer to the fully determined wave patterns produced by these motions as sound or not, since the complex pattern of shocks that enters the system contain the blueprint for the sound that emerges from it as audible shocks to the air that impinge on our sense. I'll leave it there for the moment so you can comment on that much and tell me whether I am making an error in principle here or simply using the word sound in a misleading way. In other words, if I replaced the word 'sound' with 'shock wave pattern' or something unless I was talking about the shock waves that reach my sense organs, would I still be in error? >The traditional and historic model of the soundboard has sound traveling >through the soundboard, as you described, but this is not the way the >soundboard really works. Well, I'd rather get the above out of the way first, but since you're almost certainly going to use the word energy in your reply, I'd like also to have that clearly defined. We are clearly not talking of electrical energy which exhibits a certain form and nor are we talking of nuclear energy, which is quite different; and we are not talking of the energy in a hydraulic turbine system. So this energy is of a certain type which is seeded as x and flourishes as nx + y. It seems to me that "sound energy" might be a way to describe it, but maybe you'd question that as well. One way or another, I think 'energy' is not a definite enough term to describe the phenomenon. I hope we can deal with this a step at a time. JD
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