Tag Archives: Chris Waltham

Musical Acoustics at Vancouver’s (Canada) April 29, 2014 Café Scientifique

Vancouver’s next Café Scientifique is being held in the back room of the The Railway Club (2nd floor of 579 Dunsmuir St. [at Seymour St.], Vancouver, Canada), on Tuesday, April 29,  2014 at 7:30 pm. Here’s the meeting description (from the April 23, 2014 announcement),

Our next café will happen on Tuesday, April 29, 7:30pm at The Railway Club. Our speaker is Dr. Chris Waltham from UBC Physics and Astronomy. The title and abstract of his talk is:

Musical Acoustics: What do soundboxes do and how do they work? 
 

Nearly all string instruments have soundboxes to radiate the vibrational energy of the strings. These wooden boxes tend to be objects of beauty and of iconic shapes (think of a violin or guitar), but seldom is any thought given to how they work. A large part of the field of musical acoustics is the analysis of sound boxes, and although the question of “quality” remains elusive, much progress has been made. For example, pretty much every feature of a violin’s morphology can be understood in terms of vibroacoustics and ergonomics, rather than visual aesthetics (with the possible exception of the scroll, of course). Although Andrea Amati would not have used the language and methods of mechanical engineering, the form he perfected most definitely follows its function.

I like to talk about acoustics and violins. Also harps, guitars, guqins and guzhengs.

For anyone curious about Andrea Amati, there’s this from his Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),

Andrea Amati was a luthier, from Cremona, Italy.[1][2] Amati is credited with making the first instruments of the violin family that are in the form we use today.[3] According to the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota:

It was in the workshop of Andrea Amati (ca. 1505-1577) in Cremona, Italy, in the middle of the 16th century that the form of the instruments of the violin family as we know them today first crystallized.

Several of his instruments survive to the present day, and some of them can still be played.[3][4] Many of the surviving instruments were among a consignment of 38 instruments delivered to Charles IX of France in 1564.

As for guqins and guzhengs, they are both Chinese stringed instruments of 7 strings and 18 or more strings, respectively.