Oxygen tank bells

Message: 5
From: flint@squidgey.com
Subject: Oxygen Tank Bells?
Flint Weiss

>greetings. I'll take a short stab at your bell
>questions. I've spent 23 years making bronze
>gongs, and used oxygen tank bells at Mills College
>playing music of Paul Schaleger

1) Which tone in a bell is the one that our minds select to be the
bell's pitch?

> the tone that sustains. use padded sticks or rubber
> hammers to experiment and find the tone.

2) Does anyone have any good ideas on how to measure these tones?

> the guy who commented on Risset had the right idea: you
> would benefit from an FFT analysis, and there are some
> easy-to-use for small computers. you need to get
> the waveform up on a display and look at it.
> Best would be make a tape or loop the sound (record it)
> and use a software analyser to find the frequencies.

> the wav prog for church bells can give you a hard
> time because the shape of your tank bells is
> different - right, so the classic western bell
> shape and harmonic series will not apply.

Richard A. Sanford Ph.D.
New York City

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Hi Flint,

Interesting sound. Have you tried looking at the wave form?

It's a very fast saw tooth or triangular wave superimposed on a basically sinusoidal waveform.

Most intruiging!

I'm in the middle of adding an option to my freeware / shareware program FTS to find
the FFT for sections of a waveform, which you select using left and rt click.

You can also remake the wave from the partials as sine waves and hear what it sounds like, as in the
WAVANAL program.

I've added options for FFT peak interpolation between the bin sizes, which will
usually give a closer estimate of the frequency than you get with WAVANAL.

Perhaps you'll find it helpful once it is done?

More anon.

Robert

Hi Flint,

> It's a very fast saw tooth or triangular wave superimposed on a basically
> sinusoidal waveform.

Sorry, tried opening it in other sound programs and it is showing up as
a normal wave form without the zig zags.

Obviously need to do some more work on the wave file reading side of my program
(new feature).

Robert