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Contact: luke.fletcher@anu.edu.au INFOENG SEMINAR SERIES Colloquium series
The Nonlinear Acoustics of Musical InstrumentsProfessor Neville H. Fletcher (Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, Australian National University)DATE: 2006-05-26 TIME: 11:00:00 - 12:00:00 LOCATION: RSISE Seminar Room, ground floor, building 115, cnr. North and Daley Roads, ANU ABSTRACT: The harmonic spectra and resulting scales and harmonies of common musical instruments are actually very far from being a result of simple linear behaviour. Indeed instruments such as violins, flutes, clarinets and trumpets might be characterised as being "essentially nonlinear". Bells and other percussion instruments, on the other hand, are very nearly linear in behaviour, though in some cases, such as gongs and cymbals, the "incidental nonlinearity" can give rise to impressive effects. This talk will deal with all three classes of instruments and show how a nonlinear-systems approach can explain the differing ways in which they operate and the sounds they produce. BIO: Returning to Australia after taking his PhD at Harvard, Neville Fletcher spent four years with CSIRO and then was for twenty years Professor of Physics at the University of New England in Armidale NSW, before returning to CSIRO as Director of the Institute of Physical Sciences. Since retirement in 1995 he has been a full-time Visiting Fellow in RSPhysSE. His research has covered such diverse fields as transistor design, crystal nucleation and growth, cloud physics and rainmaking, the chemical physics of ice, and more recently the acoustics of musical instruments and biological acoustics. He has published five books on scientific topics, one academic history, and a book of short stories, together with nearly 200 scientific papers. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, and has received many awards.
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