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comment by demure
demure  ·  1555 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Some Christmastime carillon carols (performed by yours truly)

    Interested.

Duly noted.

The bells already have an intrinsic long ring to them (because if we remember a damper pedal on the piano, when pressed, lets the strings vibrate and die out naturally since it lifts the felts, whereas when it isn't pressed the felts will shorten the die-out time). Shortening their ring sounds terrible--you can do so by regulating the instrument poorly and it's just awful.





am_Unition  ·  1554 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It doesn't have to be awful! Surely there are decent methods of damping out whatever oscillation mode you've induced in the bell that don't pinch it into a random dissonant note. It's just not gonna be cheap to hire someone to engineer it, and it'd be similarly expensive to build. Still, I'm kinda surprised it's not a thing yet.

BRB, posting on why-combinator for investment solicitations. Narrator/schizophrenia: This sarcasm is particularly rich coming from the guy who spent a few hours yesterday, with fam in tow, at one of these places, which wouldn't exist without dat sweet startup oomph.

tagging kleinbl00 for audioskillz

kleinbl00  ·  1554 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Wanna see where you made an ass out of u and me?

    oscillation mode

With a string you've got one-dimensional oscillation modes. With a plate you've got two-dimensional oscillation modes with all the misadventures that entails; with a surface you've got three-dimensional oscillation modes and they're all interdependent. Also keep in mind that try as you might, the material properties of that bell aren't necessarily homogeneous across the bell and non-homogeniety is going to change your interdependencies away from what you know to what you don't. "Non-homogeniety" in this case being "damping one part but not all parts of the bell" because you suddenly changed the damping coefficient for part of the bell but not all of it.

I accidentally made a bell in beat-on-shit-with-a-hammer class. It was dope. But I had two half-spheres of nickel silver, same treatment, same size, and one of them was a semitone more flat than the other. Why? Because bells are fucking complicated. I dug into it just enough to go "well damn, they were grinding the things in like seven different places to try and get the first five harmonics to line up to their temperament by ear" and recognized that me and my silver hammer should be happy with a semitone.