Bassoons
November 6, 2008 – 9:06 pmI have heard that bassoons have a weird property: when they play a note, their fundamental frequency is nearly absent. The ear-brain system fills in this frequency, making the bassoon sound very low pitched without actually containing much of the very low frequencies.
How can I verify this? (Google is failing me here.) How can I find whether it’s possible to have the reverse – a sound that seems high-pitch without actually containing high frequencies? This seems pretty impossible to me right now, but then again, so does the bassoon thing. There’s probably some weird perception stuff going on in the brain that I don’t understand. If there is such a thing, I wonder if I can find a way to put that as an “instrument” on my digital piano so I can actually hear my right hand play.
3 Responses to “Bassoons”
Bassoon + frequency domain => analyze?
By nikki on Nov 7, 2008
FWIW, the wikipedia article on bassoons includes spectrograms of a bassoon’s Bb in four octaves; the lower ones appear to actually have a lot of energy in the lower frequencies. Maybe you were hearing about a special Jedi basoon?
wikipedia article for the hard-of-googling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bassoon#Audio_examples
By dwins on Nov 8, 2008
So I was watching this earlier and made a mental note to send it to you…then I read this post and knew I must. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen.html
<3 Liz
By Elizabeth on Nov 10, 2008