HUMANBEATBOX.COM - Oscillations

Articles

By TyTe

Why does doing a lip oscillation make a classic kick or snare drum sound louder and punchier?

When you say the letter b, you are simply making one sound as shown by this waveform:

When you do an oscillation (i.e. a vibration), you make more than one sound and two sounds are louder than one - this is why it sounds louder. Look at this waveform - see the distinct bumps?:

Also, the human ear interprets oscillations as having a pitch or a tone. Because your lips are vibrating at a low frequency or speed, your ear hears this oscillation as a bass note. This means by varying the speed of the oscillation, you can actually give your kick drums a bass note without needing to hum! This spectrogram of a lip oscillation shows a fundamental frequency of 57Hz (that's the big first spike).

Listen to this lip oscillation that is sounding at 57Hz (that's 57 cycles per second) - way lower than a human can hum. The computer tone takes over to highlight the bass note.

Here's an example of a b kick drum with a pitched oscillation. The oscillation starts off long to help you hear the note, then it gets shorter and shorter until you have just the [ b ] kick drum.

52237 Views - View Comments (0)