Ron N: >.... Should anyone out there wish to throw sufficiently large >quantities of cash at me that I don't ever have to work for a living >again, and can afford the space, equipment, and materials to pursue >it, the R&D could progress at a much accelerated pace. David L: >As Ron N said, give me enough money that I don't have to worry about >making a living anymore and I'm right there with him doing all the >real research and providing real data that will further enlighten us >on the subject. Ron N: >Standing by for offers... Well I am not in a position to be a benefactor guys. (We do have the Medici's to thank for supporting BC for all those years while he tinkered away with his piano invention in the first place.) However, I AM in a position to offer research resources. I have a new graduate student whose project will focus on soundboard design for two years. He'll be investigating some of my (weird) soundboard ideas for the post-modern piano being designed here. And I have all kinds of measurement equipment and lab resources available for free. It would be quite feasible to add on some experimentation with the ideas that have been tossed about recently, and so many times before, on the extent to which compression and crown affect soundboard response, as well as the nature of that influence. How to proceed? Well, if you've seen my article in December journal, you'll see my views about research and how technicians should be involved in the collaboration. We should agree together on a set of specific design questions that can be tested experimentally. Between the various names that have contributed to this most recent thread we can surely put together a good investigative project, varying specific factors and measuring the change in behaviour they cause. The time for this work now, because grad students turn back into pumpkins at midnight (when they graduate). So, if I put the time in to supervise this research here and my grad student does the work on the experiments, all we would need from you guys is soundboards of various types to study, made according to your normal practices and methods. If we can agree in principle let's start thinking specifically what we can test and how we can best do it, as well as how to target variation in a single design factor at one time. An idea that comes to mind immediately would be a direct comparison between three soundboards otherwise identical (ribs, geometry, material, crown): (1) heavily CC, (2) RC, with a teaspoon of CC, and (3) RC&S with only a dash of CC. As far as possible all three should be designed to give the same crown at typical operating ambient conditions. So as to keep the mass and height of the ribs essentially the same i suggest: (1) has flat ribs, (2) is radiused to give a similar crown to (1) at a semi-severe drying level (you guys who make these things must have some feel by now for how these things are going to come out), and (3) is radiused to match the crown of (1). So, between you all, can you guys put together the victims? Terry? Dave? Ron? Del? Dale? others? [Ric is exempt since he's lurking away in Scandinavia] Who wants to take a stab at a suitable set of quantitative measures to characterize the behaviour of the boards in meaningful piano terms? Stephen -- Dr Stephen Birkett Piano Design Lab Department of Systems Design Engineering University of Waterloo, Waterloo ON Canada N2L 3G1 tel: 519-888-4567 Ext. 33792 Lab room E3-3160 Ext. 37115 mailto: sbirkett[at]real.uwaterloo.ca http://real.uwaterloo.ca/~sbirkett
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