OBjective: Make your own instruments from scratch
Music is awesome. Face it, if we didn't have it, life would be much more miserable. And while it's great to listen to music, it's much cooler to actually play music. And what's better than playing it with instruments? Playing instruments that YOU MADE ON YOUR OWN. Seems scary to make instruments from scratch at first, but with the right amount of knowledge, you will be able to make an instrument and play it like a professional. So why not try it? Here's what my group (consisting of me, Noah and Brian) did.
thescienceofinstruments.pdf | |
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Instruments are cool. They can allow people to make music by moving their fingers and hands. But how do they work? First, we need to cover sound waves. Sound waves are, well, waves of energy that travel through whatever medium permitted. For example, sound moves through all three main forms of matter: Solids, Liquids, and Gases. Sound is really vibration, which transmits energy through the medium until it reaches the ear of an organism. But the ear doesn't do the work. It just makes the sound wave 'viewable' to the brain (like changing a file from a windows .exe to a mac .app or a .xcf to a .png or a .avi to a .mp4). The brain does all of the work, interpreting sound waves. Wave speed varies based on medium. For example, the speed of sound through air is 340.29 m/s or 761.2 mph. All waves through air at sea level travel at this speed. Waves travel fastest in solids and slowest in gases, leaving a middle speed in liquids. Waves in general have crests (the peak or compression), troughs (the lowest points or rarefaction), wavelengths, speeds, and frequencies. Each individual note has a different frequency, which leads to the difference in tone.
The Xylophone:
The xylophone works by striking it with some sort of object (like a mallet or a stick of wood. I also had fun hitting it with my phone. For the sake of realism, we used professional Glockenspiel mallets) then it makes a sound. This sound is made by displacing the air. The rubber bands around the xylophone keep the individual pipes raised off of the wood, but loose enough to vibrate the air. Since they are raised off and are barely touching anything, the xylophone can make the longest and clearest sound possible.The displaced air carries the energy of the pipe to your ear, where it is ‘reformatted’ so your brain can interpret it. The metal pipes are very resonant so they are pleasing and produce clear, long notes. Longer pipes displace more air, which leads to greater wavelengths and deeper notes.
The Basaxinet:
The Basaxinet consists of a 75 centimeter long rubber tube with a tenor saxaphone mouthpiece inserted into the tube. The instrument makes sound when the mouthpiece is blown into, vibrating the bamboo reed. the reed causes the air inside the instrument to vibrate at its natural frequency, amplifying the noise. The holes decrease the length of the wave, because the air escapes as early as possible; by plugging up the holes you increase the wavelength, and thus deepen the notes. Normally, a wind instrument would be very long if you used the entire wavelength, however because you create a high pressure zone where you blow, it takes a ¼ of a wavelength to decrease the pressure to normal, which quarters the wavelength. The length of a clarinet, for instance, is the wavelength of the deepest note / 4. Each hole is roughly ¼ of the wavelength away from the reed.
The Xylophone:
The xylophone works by striking it with some sort of object (like a mallet or a stick of wood. I also had fun hitting it with my phone. For the sake of realism, we used professional Glockenspiel mallets) then it makes a sound. This sound is made by displacing the air. The rubber bands around the xylophone keep the individual pipes raised off of the wood, but loose enough to vibrate the air. Since they are raised off and are barely touching anything, the xylophone can make the longest and clearest sound possible.The displaced air carries the energy of the pipe to your ear, where it is ‘reformatted’ so your brain can interpret it. The metal pipes are very resonant so they are pleasing and produce clear, long notes. Longer pipes displace more air, which leads to greater wavelengths and deeper notes.
The Basaxinet:
The Basaxinet consists of a 75 centimeter long rubber tube with a tenor saxaphone mouthpiece inserted into the tube. The instrument makes sound when the mouthpiece is blown into, vibrating the bamboo reed. the reed causes the air inside the instrument to vibrate at its natural frequency, amplifying the noise. The holes decrease the length of the wave, because the air escapes as early as possible; by plugging up the holes you increase the wavelength, and thus deepen the notes. Normally, a wind instrument would be very long if you used the entire wavelength, however because you create a high pressure zone where you blow, it takes a ¼ of a wavelength to decrease the pressure to normal, which quarters the wavelength. The length of a clarinet, for instance, is the wavelength of the deepest note / 4. Each hole is roughly ¼ of the wavelength away from the reed.
We were also going to make an erhu (some sort of Chinese guitar played like a violin) but fell short to time and experienced complications and in the end were excused of making a third instrument.The bow of the erhu vibrates the string creating a standing wave (½ of a wavelength) that compresses and rarefies the air molecules, creating sound. When the string is held down it makes the string shorter so it vibrates faster and creates a higher pitch; where you hold it down to make different notes is based on the ratios between notes. Also the tighter you make the string the faster it vibrates, creating higher notes because it has less string to vibrate.
There were a lot of things that we did well and some things that we could have done better as well. I think a huge pit was that many days we weren't consistent on our work and getting things done. Maybe that was because of our other pit, that we couldn't agree on what to do and didn't have a given direction until near the end of the session because we had so many ideas. Eventually we got to it and had one of our peaks - when we were consistent, we were super quick and efficient. We also had so many great ideas that made our xylophone stand out a little more than the others - specifically the stand we made for it.
So that's basically it! For an example of the finished model, here is a picture of the xylophone connected to the stand that we made.