Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
You can filter the posts to see just things I wrote or made.
Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
This is a close-up photo of the bow in a violin orchestrion. The bow is circular and spins around a set of violins. The violins are dipped outward to bring the strings in contact with the bow.
Look at all of those tiny knots! To make the bow circular, the strands have to be attached to the circle in short arcs.
There are more (amazing) pics of the whole mechanism in the Flickr stream here.
You can see a similar mechanism at work in this video.
(via the Mechanical Music group on Flickr)
Apparently a violin made from wood treated with fungus sounds “better” than a Stradivarius!
Judging the tone quality of a musical instrument in a blind test is, of course, an extremely subjective matter, since it is a question of pleasing the human senses. Empa scientist Schwarze is fully aware of this, and as he says, “There is no unambiguous scientific way of measuring tone quality.” He was therefore, understandably, rather nervous before the test.
Yeah…
