For some unknown reason, I find myself using a Chinese/Japanese rhetorical pattern here where one circles in and down towards a point from a larger more general context rather than presenting an immediate thesis statement or argument. Don’t know why. Maybe the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet.
Rough day for allergies yesterday—out all day repairing fences. Patience, please. There is a point,
eventually.
We can only speculate on the earliest musical instruments. I believe a pentatonic flute made from a bird bone is the oldest known.
There undoubtedly other instruments made from less durable materials that did not survive. One day in the woods outside of Oslo, I witnessed a grandfather teaching his grandson how to separate the bark from a twig from a particular type of tree so that he had a tube of bark. He then transformed the tube into a pentatonic flute using a pocket knife, ending up with something similar to bone flutes sometimes found as Viking artifacts. Bark, reed and wooden whistles and flutes do not survive.
There is no evidence for early drums, and yet they are the most universally common instruments across all human cultures. Again, artefacts of softer organic materials seldom survive. But drums must have been among the earliest instruments.
With drums it would not be long before someone discovered that sliding a finger or thumb along the drum skin would produce an interesting and amplified squeak. People are ingenious. It would not be long before someone discovered that stretching a piece of gut twine over a piece of wood placed on the drum skin produced an interesting effect when the twine was plucked or when it was rubbed by sliding along it with fingers and thumbs and from this rubbing on to bows. All stringed musical instruments, in the abstract, are modified drums.
A soundbox/reproducer is a modified drum in which the needle and needle bar stimulate the drum skin (mica, glass, aluminium, gutapercha). It is analogous to a stringed musical instrument in which the string and bridge stimulate the drum skin (wood or skin or plastic or carbon fibre).
Changing the size and materials used for a bridge (the point of drum stimulation in a stringed musical instrument) can have profound effects, changing tone and timbre, changing relationships between fundamental tones and harmonics (clearer tones or more harmonically rich tones), changing relative volume dynamics from bass to treble, changing volume itself.
The item on epigramaphone’s new No. 4 sound box is in essence a bridge. If it is tight enough over the mica so that it doesn’t rattle unpleasantly, it will have some interesting effect,
good or bad. It increases the effective mass of the needle and the needle bar. Metal is resonant. By being flat and tight against the mica, it becomes part of the resonant surface of the diaphragm. My best
guess is that it will reduce the volume of the soundbox by restricting diaphragm movement and will produce purer fundamental tones by reducing harmonic overtones—a clearer, quieter sound. It was made, purchased, installed, and kept for a reason. It served some purpose. Speculation is fun and interesting, but let’s wait to hear back from epigramaphone before trashing the unfortunate little device completely.
Mica diaphragms are so hard that I doubt there is really a need for a spider or any other further-hardening gizmos. In any case, higher-order vibration modes are the key to broad frequency response - thanks goodness they're there in loudspeakers, otherwise reaching the entire human hearing spectrum would be quite a nightmare.
When are we going to read about the "field tests" of the gizmo?