Singing Wine Glass and Bowl Explorer

Live Script performing modal analysis of wine glasses, bowls, and other found objects scanned with a mobile phone.

Elastic vibrations of solids underlie the sound of many charming percussion musical instruments including chimes, bells, triangles, the marimba and xylophone, and everyday wine glasses and bowls known produce a beating sound when "pinged" and to "sing" when played with a finger. [1-8]

This educational interactive Live Script performs modal analysis of found objects scanned with a mobile phone app and provides example audio and video for comparison. The user can morph the shapes of the real objects and of supplied model objects. An understanding of the dependence of the acoustic spectrum on the shape and composition can be developed using the supplied files, material property assignments, visualizations, and ancillary functions. Mock impact sounds can be generated for comparison to recorded sounds.

This script may interest students and instructors of physics and related fields as well as musicians and the curious. It can be used to study any found-object scanned with a mobile phone photogrammetry app, and with files from other sources, and modified to accommodate point cloud and other object-surface or solid representations.

Included are utility functions to search for and test files for validity and to scale and deform object models to create a wide range of non-symmetric shapes. 'Try this' suggestions and 'Challenges' are included for further exploration.

This script was inspired by the example Structural Dynamics of Tuning Fork. The objects were scanned with Metascan app on a iPhone.