THE SOUND WALL

Craziest thing ever.  Yesterday, I heard the loud, deep sound of someone crashing a drum.  Closing my eyes, I heard the sound of the drum echo off a wall, the faint rumbles still audible seconds after the drum was struck.  

Moments later, again:  BOOOOM.  Again, the echoes.  My eyes closed, the echos seemed hollow... like I was standing in an empty concrete building.

Then, opening my eyes, I was disoriented by the sight of bright, blue skies.  Outlines of skyscrapers reached up above me.  Wait -- what?  What happened to the wall that had just been encircling me?

What it was, what the 'echo' I was hearing -- that I thought was the sound of a drum echoing off of a distant wall -- was resonance, or, according to Merriam-Webster dictionary, "the intensification and enriching of a musical tone by supplementary vibration".  In short: somehow, placement of the speakers around me managed to give the drum sound "supplementary vibration".  And they managed to do it in a way that made me feel like it was echoing in a room.

As I stood there, in the middle of Pritzker Pavilion, noontime on a Tuesday, I wondered how in the world someone could figure out how to place speakers in a way to create this incredible sensation.  As I chatted with a "Sound Docent", he pointed at a gentleman in the middle of the pavilion listening, motionless, with his arms folded.  "He designed this, you should talk to him," the docent told me.

I walked over, eager to learn more about how someone could create "walls" with sound.  As I got closer, the gentleman uncrossed his arms, looked up... and walked away, leaving the pavilion.  My question was left unanswered.... resonating in my head.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

LENTILBALLS (TM)

For our food class this term we have beeen studying lots of interest and very important things. For instance, we did lots of baking. And we needed to learn some math and fractions becuase a lot of recipes have fractions. One thing that I enjoyed was seeing a farm in a restaurant. It didn't look like a farm, it looked someone's garden but really big. They called it a farm anyways so thats cool. We talked about leaveing agents emulsifers and protein. The major nutriitions are proteins, fats, and carbohydprates.   For our Action Project, we need to substitutie something in a recipe. Some people are substituting a emulsifeer. Some people re substituting a leaveing agent. I will do a substitution of meat with lentils instead.   for my experiment, I used the following meatball recipe: 1lb lean (at least 80%) ground beef 1/2cup Progresso™ Italian-style bread crumbs 1/4cup milk 1/2teaspoon salt 1/2teaspoon Worcestershire sauce 1/4teaspoon pepper 1small onion, finely chopped (
Read more

A WALK ON THE RIVER

Image
 Welcome to my introductory project that's introducing WATER and the SDG's!  We have had a buys week starting school, learning about the building and where we can eat lunch naerby, meeting all our friends, and larning LOTS of names.  In our classes we began to learn some things that are imporatnt for the class, like the SDGs.  That stands for Sustainable Development Goal, and it's imporatant for us because of the problems we have to learn about.  We also didn't learn some things, like our teacher won't tell us where he's from.  And I learned about Action Proejcts, where we create work instead of taking a test. For my very first action project, I am creating a poster.  My poster is trying to capture how cool it is that Chicago has a riverwalk.  For our FE we walked along the Riverwalk as a class, and observed how the peolpe use the river.  I saw a ton of boats.  The chairs were fun too.  I made a poster about the water, did you know that from 2015 to 2020, the pe
Read more

SEEING REFLECTIONS

Image
Finding reflections in the real world is an interesting exercise.  They might not seem obvious right away, but once you start looking for them, you can find them in many places.  I'm going to find a type of reflection that's of interest to me, and offer three different ways to measure or quantify the reflection using mathematical terminology. Where I looked for reflections?  The video game "PONG".  It was created in 1972, and is famous as one of the most basic video games.  It's a simple game, still entertaining to play today -- although it's not quite as exciting as current video game releases.  But it relies on the basic geometry of reflections, as you move your 'paddle' to bounce a ball back and forth.  Only by understanding reflections can you play the game effectively. The first way to measure the reflections in Pong is using the angle.  In the screenshot below, you can see the ball approaching the paddle. The player needs to move the paddl
Read more