From: Michael Carley Date: Sat, 16 Sep 1995 15:52:32 +0000 (BST) Subject: Re: Harp reed: Clamped bar or Siren?
From my reading in the field (I suppose by trade I'm now an aeroacoustician) what you're looking at is a particular type of edge tone. You do not want to see the maths for these things. What it looks like to me is that you have a feedback from the reed to the mouth and the sound you get comes from the fluid dynamics there, rather than from a simple vibrating system.
Lets put it this way. There's a great paper called "Contributions to the theory of aerodynamic sound, with application to excess jet noise and the theory of the flute". It's fifty-odd pages in a hard-core fluid mechanics journal and the section on the flute (a sort of by-the-way) takes up four or five. And a flute has no moving parts. Another paper (written by Stephen Hawking's boss) on how a flow makes noise as it comes out of a pipe and hits and edge is thirty pages long. We are not talking trivial problems here.
- -- Survivors Describe A320 Flight As `Normal' (Aviation Week) m.carl~eoleo.mme.tcd.ie +353 1 6081134 Michael Carley, Mechanical Engineering, Trinity College, Dublin Home page
