Build Your Own Glockenspiel 

We are proud to have produced a glockenspiel from mostly recyclable materials that produces almost identical bell sounds to a real glockenspiel. Using an app called Fourier we tuned all notes and afterwards used an app called ProTuner which told us that each pipe (except one) corresponded to the appropriate note in the desired octave. We achieved our aesthetic and creative goals by creating a unique copper glockenspiel made out of purely recyclable materials. More importantly though, seeing that our instrument is built completely from scratch and from recyclable copper pipes and wood, we were very satisfied with the musical component of our creative invention. As mentioned before, because we cut the copper pipes to exact measurements and our frequency and length calculations were very precise (for the most part), eight out nine of our notes were tuned well. As such, nearly all the notes had a pleasant, melodic bell tone when tapped lightly.

 

As with all success, there is failure. Even though most of our notes had a euphonic sound, because we didn’t cut the pipe for the E note to the nearest millimetre, when testing the precision of the frequencies of our notes with the ProTuner, we saw that the E note had a frequency which corresponds to an F note. There are several reasons behind this error. One explanation is that we didn’t mark the nodes at the right location and as a result the Fourier app calculated an incorrect peak frequency of the sound produced by tapping the pipe. Another plausible cause of error might have been sanding the copper pipe too rigidly and thus, shortening the pipe by a few critical millimetres. Furthermore, we made an error in positioning the copper pipes at precisely the same elevation. Although we hammered all the nails the same distance into the wood, we made an error in our conceptual design of the surrounding straws. By cutting the pieces of straw a little too long, we considerably reduced the area for the rubber bands to hang on top of the straws. As a result of the very limited space, most of the rubber bands attached below an adjacent set of rubber bands slid to the surface of the main boards. This slightly influenced the resonance of our notes because it caused some pipes to come into contact with the surface of wood, creating a less assonant sound. Lastly, we did not consider the position of the nodes when marking the alignment of the nails. Instead we simply hammered the nails on every other even spaced tick mark along the centre line of each main board. Because some of the nodes are off the center line, in order to improve our model we needed to shift the nails in such a way that a rubber band across two neighboring lines will cross the pipe as close as to the node line on the pipe. We would also have to be very careful not to hammer the nails too close to the edge of the wood, because the wood could split.   

           

In terms of possible design changes, we could have used actual rubber stops, for instance, heat shrinking tubing to minimize the sliding of the rubber bands. This would not only look more structurally adept, but more importantly it would improve the resonance of the notes by notably decreasing the contact of the pipes with the wooden boards. Another design modification would be colouring the copper pipes so that they are shiny and aesthetically pleasing. Moreover, for more powerful resonance we could construct bigger mallet heads from a softer material than wood, such as rubber.