Sound waves(a neat experiment)

[Ron Nossaman]

Richard, and anyone else still reading these,

I forgot to mention. Looking at my description of how the fork oscillates
along it's length, it might strike you that for each tine excursion cycle
from all the way out to all the way in, to all the way out again, the
handle would move up and down twice. The handle contact produced frequency
should be twice that of the tines. Listening to the pitch of the two tones,
they sound the same. One of the downloadable shareware FFT spectrum
analyzers, or Tunelab, shows the peak at the fundamental tone of the fork
in air, and the same fundamental peak with a similar-to-stronger peak at
double the fork frequency from tabletop contact with the handle. Actually,
you'll get more partials than that, but the second partial in the table
contact test is disproportionately strong.

Note also that a ringing fork, twirled slowly next to your ear, gets quiet
at 45° off plane.

Interesting stuff about the forks we thought we knew.


Ron N