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Physics 224: Assignment 7

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22 views3 pages

Physics 224: Assignment 7

Uploaded by

wyatt
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Physics 224
Assignment 7
Due 16 November 2021; before 5PM
Marker: Huiwen Shen <[email protected]>
Submit through myCourses, show your work please.
1. In designing a piano, it turns out to be hard to make the highest notes
“sustain” (resonate) as long as you would like. Let us get a hint of why.
All you need to know about a piano for this problem is that, for each
note, a hammer hits a string with a resonance at the desired frequency,
and the string then rings down without any new energy being put in.
For the piano sound to have good “sustain” we want a note to lose at
most 20 dB of SIL after 2 seconds (roughly, the length of a whole note).
What must be the Q of the string (actually strings) which plays middle
C (C4) in order to achieve this?

2. The top note on a piano is C8. What Q would the resonance producing
this sound need to have, to lose 20 dB loudness over the duration of a
whole note, 2 seconds? What if it only needs to last the duration of an
8th note, 1/4 second?
3. Explain qualitatively in words (only use equations if you find it helpful)
why it is, that if each string on the piano had the same Q, then the
low notes would keep ringing “forever”, and the top notes would die off
very fast. (The piano covers over 7 octaves of range, from A0 to C8.)

4. Why aren’t the finger holes on a flute, oboe, or other reed instrument
evenly spaced? Are the holes closer together near the bell (end) of the
instrument, or near the reed or embouchure hole?

5. Recall that the number of half steps from a note of frequency f1 to a


note of frequency f2 is,

number of half-steps from f1 to f2 = 12 × log2 (f2 /f1 )

with a negative number indicating that f2 is the frequency of a deeper


(lower) note than f1 . Alternately, the frequency of a note is

fnote = 440 hz × 2number of halfsteps from A4 /12

Recall that 1/100 of a half-step is called a cent.


Finally, remember that the index on the note changes in going from B
to C, not from G# to A; so the G below A4 is G4 , but the B below C4
is B3 . The two pairs without a sharped note between them are B, C
and E, F .
Recall that A4 = 440 Hz. What is the frequency of,
• A5 ?
• D4 ?
• F6# ?
• E1 played 17 cents flat?

What note (letter, sharp or flat, and number of cents off) is each of
these frequencies?

• 220 Hz?
• 659.255 Hz?
• 1000 Hz?
• 586.667 Hz?
• 137.5 Hz (110 Hertz times 5/4)?

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