MATERIALS
Orchestral harps with carbon-fibre soundboards would be more robust and sound just as good as harps with wooden soundboards, according to Thomas Royston and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The quality of the soundboard, a flat piece of spruce just above the player鈥檚 knee, determines the instrument鈥檚 tone. A carbon-fibre soundboard would be less vulnerable to damage when an instrument is moved between performances or rehearsals.
HEARING
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Infants find it difficult to hear someone calling their name when there is a lot of background noise. Adults are able to understand speech even when it is 8 decibels softer than the background noise 鈥� this is the so-called cocktail-party effect. But Rochelle Newman at the University of Maryland found that 4.5-month-old infants could only recognise the sound of their names when spoken at 10 decibels above the background level.
PERCUSSION
Anyone who wants to record or amplify a steel band should be careful where they put their microphones in relation to the steel drums. Researchers at the University of the West Indies and the University of Illinois have shown that the 鈥渇ront鈥� of the steel drum 鈥� where the drummer stands 鈥� produces the loudest sound. But the rear of the drum, which faces the audience, produces the brighter harmonic-rich sound.
MUSICAL PITCH
Is perfect pitch inherited or is it learnt? This question has been extraordinarily difficult to resolve, because to name a note you have to have some musical training. David Ross and his colleagues at the Yale School of Medicine reasoned that if perfect pitch was a feat of memory, the ability to name a tone would depend strongly on its tonal quality 鈥� whether the note was played on a piano or by a trumpet, say. In tests on people who claimed to have perfect pitch, the researchers found that some people could pick out the pitch regardless of the tonal quality, while others could not. So it seems some people inherit it and some learn it 鈥� and most of us don鈥檛 have it at all.
