war tuba!
Apparently some versions of the telharmonium, one of the earliest electronic synthesizers, weighted up to 200 tons.
Earth Harp is a sham. Whatever sound it makes isn’t coming from those strings; pretty sure he just uses them as triggers for a synthesizer, or else he’s just moving his hands in synch with a synthesizer that’s on autopilot.
Having seen Cast in Bronze several times, I cannot image a louder or bigger instrument than a carillon
I thought of the apparatus/arrangement/sequence of things to hit in the OK Go video “Needing/Getting.”
(Which is described in a behind-the-scenes clip as a “mile-and-a-half-long instrument.”)
Better that than heaven-spanning trumpets of eternal doom.
Touché!
I finally got curious enough to google the Wanamaker organ. Here is what I found:
So Wanamaker’s has become Macy’s! And the Atlantic City organ is apparently bigger but basically non-functional. Who knew?
And you say that why? Because you can’t imagine how it works, or aren’t familiar with acoustic engineering? Are you familiar with transverse waves, and how rosin causes strings and pipes to vibrate?
The web page for the the Earth Harp notes that the wave is a longitudinal wave - which makes sense. The velocity in a wire of the longitudinal wave is significantly faster than a transverse wave, and less lossy - so the length of wire vibrating for a given note is much longer. There is however another interesting statement: “he created a method of tuning the giant long strings; using a specially designed tuning block that he discovered could tune the strings to any scale.” My guess is that this tuning block is fully determining the frequency of the system, and that the strings are acting as transmission lines, not as resonant elements. Depending upon the tension in the strings and the losses in them, you could have a line that simply adsorbed all the energy at the bowed end, through to one that returned a reasonable amount of energy - but with quite a delay. The strings would be acting as an echo - providing a sense of space to the sound - one that was related to the size and nature of the installation - and thus rather in keeping with the idea of the Earth Harp in the first place.
Energising of the tuning blocks comes from energy injected from the strings - and due to the close coupling of the blocks to the nearby part of the string the physics of bowed strings and fingers on wine glasses (bowed is a transverse wave, finger on glass a longitudinal wave here ) couples well - but it isn’t the string that determines the frequency - but it does determine the overall acoustical characteristic.
The Earth Harp does remind me a bit of Lucier’s Music on a long thin wire - although the physical principles are different, there are some overlaps, both in mechanism and in artistic ideas.
Especially after Hurricane Sandy.
It looks like something invented by Dr. Seuss!
Incredible. I had no clue such things were in use.
Yeah, they’re acoustical locators.. Never heard of them before this thread.