Pipelinefunk Gon’ Give It to You
In this video, musician Armin Küpper performs a saxophone duet with the echo of his past self by playing near the end of a large pipe. That’s pretty cool. And it’s also a learning opportunity! Hey wait, come back…you haven’t finished your bowl of physics yet:
What you hear after each note is an echo, a sound wave reflecting off the far end of the pipe and traveling back to him.
Sound travels at around 343 meters per second (1,235 km/h or 767 mph) through air. In this video, the echo takes about 1.5 seconds to return. That means the reflected sound traveled about 514.5 meters (1,688 feet) round-trip, so the end of the pipe is at around 257 meters (843 ft) away.
It seems more like a second to me (so ~563 feet), but whatever…still cool.
Comments 4
This. THIS, is the magical, joyful, inter-webbery that I need. I love the random empty pipe, bicycle, beers, clapping-friend vibe. The music is good too. Thank you.
Similar in concept, but at 210 milliseconds: Nuno Bettencourt of Extreme playing "Flight of the Wounded Bumblebee," where every other note is a delayed copy of the previous note. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJvG1i79CPc
Perfect opportunity for me to recommend the reverberation episode of Watch the Sound. I loved the whole series but it didn’t seem to make much impact. Seems like ideal Kottke fodder. https://tv.apple.com/us/episode/reverb/umc.cmc.60c384wwnrxmpnp7nsygpuprq?showId=umc.cmc.56ka6i8ccv7tsatj6nd1uo808
Love this!
The song is about 104bpm, and it's timed such that the duet partner at the end of the pipe will respond in 2 beats. So the more precise return time is 60/104*2 = 1.154s (or 0.577s for one length), giving the pipe a length of 0.577*343 = 198m or 0.577*767 / 3600*5280 = 649ft.
You're much closer!
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