Who needs a scope?

[itdontgo]

How about this for an acoustic Oscilloscope?  Just needs a trigger!

s

[trevwhite]

That is excellent!

[Falcon69]

That has got to be one of the coolest things I've seen.

I had no idea the strings vibrate like that.  Good song too.

 

[awallin]

I have a feeling that the actual motion of the strings is much simpler. The linked video above, and many others on youtube, show an aliasing effect due to the limited fps of the camera.

real motion is a bit like this maybe

[HAL-42b]

Fun fact: The most sensitive and fastest responding galvanometer ever was not the mirror galvanometer as it is widely believed. In fact it was the String Galvanometer invented by Dr. Willem Einthoven in 1901.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Einthoven



Dr. Einthoven invented the string galvanometer because he had a task - He wanted to measure the beat of the heart. In order to do this he needed to invent a device sensitive enough to do just that - record the human heartbeat before any sort of electrical amplification even existed.

DeForest's Audion tube was in 1906, remember.

Thus he invented the ECG without electronic amplification and got a Nobel prize for it in 1924.



This is what won a Nobel Prize in 1924, and this is photograph of a vibrating string.

His galvanometers were so sensitive that it is said there are no clearer ECG graphs taken with by any other equipment, even today.



In order to achieve that sensitivity Endhoven's galvanometers had to be massive water cooled behemoths. They working was based on Lenz's Law - a current carrying object placed in a magnetic field moves sideways, and not towards one of the poles. This was extremely counterintuitive to me for very long time. 



And you still had to observe the string trough a microscope or project it on a moving film in order to get a graph.



The funniest thing was that how Eindhoven produced the string for his galvanometer. Obviously, the thinner the string is the more sensitive the apparatus will be. So he manufactured his strings from pure quartz and then coated them with gold or silver in order to make them conductive. T

The filament was originally made by drawing out a filament of glass from a crucible of molten glass. To produce a sufficiently thin and long filament an arrow was fired across the room so that it dragged the filament from the molten glass. The filament so produced was then coated with silver to provide the conductive pathway for the current. By tightening or loosening the filament it is possible to very accurately regulate the sensitivity of the galvanometer.


So this is how guitars and oscilloscopes and strings and bows with arrows tie up in my sleep deprived mind.

[dom0]

To produce a sufficiently thin and long filament an arrow was fired across the room so that it dragged the filament from the molten glass.

That's some serious heavy metal science. 

[joeqsmith]

To produce a sufficiently thin and long filament an arrow was fired across the room so that it dragged the filament from the molten glass.

Wow

[timb]

Someone has to have done this with a multi-thousand FPS camera. That would show the true string movement and remove the aliasing, right?

[miguelvp]

Someone has to have done this with a multi-thousand FPS camera. That would show the true string movement and remove the aliasing, right?

Maybe this can do the job at 1 trillion FPS



More info:
http://video.mit.edu/watch/visualizing-video-at-the-speed-of-light-one-trillion-frames-per-second-9742/

[timb]

Someone has to have done this with a multi-thousand FPS camera. That would show the true string movement and remove the aliasing, right?

Maybe this can do the job at 1 trillion FPS



More info:
http://video.mit.edu/watch/visualizing-video-at-the-speed-of-light-one-trillion-frames-per-second-9742/

Hmmm, that might not work, actually! It uses a laser and moveable mirror to scan a scene over time and then uses the data to reconstruct what happens at the photon level. So, it needs a still scene to do the job. It's like a sampling oscilloscope, when what we need is a realtime one.

Pretty cool non the less. I'd read about that a few years back but didn't know they had it working!