This is a unique phenomenon with the electric aeolian harp. Last Friday the strings of the harp were close enough in pitch to ring sympathetically with the 11 am tornado siren test. In the first file you can clearly hear the siren go up in pitch and hold. In the second file you can hear the siren wind down but less clearly. In effect the aeolian harp was a microphone, albeit a very elaborate one. The spectrograms can be enlarged by clicking on them. The files are noisy because I normalized a low strength signal, which it to be expected in a situation like this. I am hoping to put together a sympathetic microphone in the near future because I want to explore this tangential acquisition of sound.
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[…] – like the 3rd bridge post. This modification was inspired by the harp picking up a tornado warning siren by sympathetic vibration. The reasoning here is that the steel plate offers more surface area and would be a more sensitive […]