Re: OT-fundamentals in sound (was singing bowls)

[rich <rich@nuvision.com>]

Maybe it's too much of an open ended discussion to compare hand 
hammered brass bowls (actually, from what i know, tibetan bowls are 
not just brass but a combination of metals) to speaker cones and 
enclosures?

With the bowls, you are taking a hand hammered piece of metal which 
is often not perfect in it's construction.  And then you are rubbing 
it with a stick of a certain weight, with a certain amount of force 
and technical ability.  How can you measure the 'efficiency' of such 
a thing?  Can it be done?  What about one bowl versus another?  One 
player versus another?

This discussion made me think of what a bowl would sound like and 
what frequencies could be generated by making some sort of pneumatic 
device that would hold the bowl (small suction cup at the bottom?), 
and spin a dowel around the lip, and you could vary the speed of 
rotation, and the pressure applied to the bowl.

yowza, put that in your pipe and smoke it, Leslie Speaker!  maybe it 
would be some sort of feedback/frequency cannon.  Survival Research 
Labs?  i got an idea for you!

rich


>
>Regarding efficiency, I cannot say how efficient the bowls are.  As you
>play them you constantly put energy into them.  I make no claims for
>the bowls efficiency, but they could be inefficient (and per stated
>principles) and still be loud and low freq.  It tires me to play them
>for very long, but I'm not sure how to quantify the energy I put into
>the bowl from the playing (how efficient is the energy transfer from my
>hand to the stick to the bowls edge?).  A single strike to the bowl
>will excite it at the low fundamental, if you hit it in the right area.