See what makes the sound. Amazing stuff.
Snare & Cymbal in Super Slow Motion - YouTube
Snare & Cymbal in Super Slow Motion - YouTube
Definitely! It's hard to believe the deflection wasn't artificially enhanced to aid visualization of the waveform.The cymbal is especially surprising!
Dale
It's hard to believe the deflection wasn't artificially enhanced to aid visualization of the waveform.
I have seen other slow motion films that show similar deflection. When a cymbal that is properly played finally fails it will uaually break along the concentric circles visible on its surface from the manufacturing process. If you end up with a hole in the cymbal, you are hitting it hard with the end of the stick.
I have seen a slow motion film of a guitar (maybe it was a bass guitar) string being plucked with a pick. The camera was looking down the neck from above the bridge. You can see the initial deflection move down the string to the nut, and then be reflected back toward the bridge. The process repeats, and after a few cycles the second harmonic is clearly visible as a double deflection along the string.
The slow motion demos I saw were captured on FILM and shown to us by a high speed camera manufacturer during a demo presentation to our company. The guitar and cymbal shots were to educate manufacturing engineers about harmonic motion. The presentation was all about unintended deflection and the peak deflection generated by the sum of the fundamental and harmonics along a PC board during high speed SMD pick and place operation.
There are Youtube videos of guitars and basses being plucked, but none seems to show the harmonics like the demo did 20+ years ago.
No kidding! A few years back I attended an audio show in Washington, DC. That evening there was a jazz concert in a room where just 2 hours before I had listened to Hi-Fi. The difference was not subtle. That's when I realized that a ride cymbal is a 19" tweeter.And we expect our speakers to reproduce that wavefront![]()

I think this is the origin of the video above. Lots of cool stuff here.
Music in slow motion - Guitar, Bass, Drum Kit, Piano and Violin - YouTube
Music in slow motion - Guitar, Bass, Drum Kit, Piano and Violin - YouTube
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