Author Archives: John Bradford Robertson

Tuning Timpani

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Starting in fourth grade and ending in tenth grade, I spent several days a week at our school’s concert band practice. I was a percussion player and that meant learning new and interesting instruments on a regular basis. I had grown up playing the piano which made me one of the few drummers who could quickly sight-read musical notes while playing mallet instruments like the marimba. The keys on a piano are very similar to most mallet percussion instruments.

When I moved on from middle school to high school I had the opportunity to play a new instrument, the timpani. These are very large drums that sit on the floor with the head of the drums at the height of most people’s waist. The drums are tuned using a pedal at their base. The pedal stretches the head of the drum and creates different sounds. The interesting part about tuning the timpani was matching the pitch of the drum to that of a specific note required for a song. While other instruments would be warming up for a song, I would be using a pitch pipe to dial in the notes required on each drum.

When I was matching the pitch of the drums to the pitch pipe, I was actually just comparing their perceived frequencies. Many people can relate to pitch: low frequency sounds have a low pitch and high frequency sounds high pitch. A low pitch would be the sound you hear from a large drum, while a higher pitch would be a note played on a flute. Playing around with the tension in the head of the drum changed the physical movement of the head when hit with a mallet, and that changed the pitch that I was hearing.

The actual movement  that takes place when a musician strikes a drum head is what creates a sound. The head moves up and down rapidly, creating changes in air pressure that follow a sinusoidal wave. This wave is commonly known as a sound wave. The frequency of the wave is perceived as pitch. The amplitude or intensity of the wave is perceived as loudness. A higher amplitude wave will produce a louder sound for the audience.

So it turns out that the entire time I was messing around with the tuning pedals on the timpani, I was really playing with the basic physics of creating sound.

“What Color is This?”

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Throughout my life I have been corrected numerous times when stating the color of an object or material. Shades of purple and blue can get mixed up as well as shades of green and red. I am often corrected by my fiancé when picking out new clothing at a store, and there are even times when I have to ask her, “What color is this?” Although it can be frustrating at times admitting that I am wrong and my fiancé is right, this form of colorblindness has not affected me too much in my daily life. Maybe this colorblindness is a reason as to why I often chose neon colors as my favorite because they are the easiest for me to identify?

Unfortunately for my younger sister, this problem has become much more of an obstacle. During this class we have learned that red/green colorblindness can be hereditary and this has proved to be true for her as well. She is in her sophomore year at The United States Air Force Academy and recently found out she is red/green colorblind just like I am. However, she suffered immediate consequences regarding her future in the military. This colorblindness meant that she will never be allowed to pilot an airplane like she had once hoped. Many of the indicator lights in an airplane are small dots of red and green next to each other, so the slightest hesitation in determining them could prove deadly. Although I know this seemed like a huge setback for her at first, I believe she is handling it quite well. As a result of not being able to fly a plane, she has learned to fly her body, and has become an avid skydiver over the last year. She even is planning on helping me earn my skydiving license this summer.

This red/green colorblindness is a result of genetics. When light enters the eye is hits the rods and cones in the retina. The cones are responsible for color vision and contain photo pigments that respond to the amount of light that is hitting them. There are three types of cones in the eye that allow a person to see color when they send signals to the brain together. However, if any of the cones are deficient, then a person will not be able to see a full spectrum of color. My sister and I have most likely both inherited this from our parents due to a bad X chromosome. The difference is that I inherited this from only my mother because as a male I only have one X chromosome. My sister however, has received deficient X chromosomes from both my mother and father because she has two X chromosomes and still is red/green colorblind.

There are many tests to determine if a person is colorblind and the most popular is a dot test. These tests are often available for free online and can help a person gain some insight into their ability to see color. The following website has a free colorblind test for those readers who are interested.

http://enchroma.com/test/instructions/