Metal Vibrations

The project that I'm pursuing is centered around a performable metal plate driven by a surface-mount transducer.

The most common example of such a system is a "plate reverb", a method for reverb very popular on recordings from the 1960's and 1970's.

Here is a great video discussing and demonstrating a typical plate reverb and how it sounds:

So, the basic components include a large, thin steel sheet, a driver, and a pickup.

Some of the research that I've done so far indicates that the size and stiffness of the plate is incredibly important. The typical goal with reverb is to have a large number of lush resonances so that no specific frequencies are obviously dominating the others.

My goal is kind of the opposite: I want a handful of very strong resonances that ring clearly. Probably more like what you'd get from a cymbal. Although cymbals are very noisy when hit, you'll still get a handful of very strong frequencies that pop out when you bow a cymbal. You can kind of hear that effect in this video:



Earlier this week, I played around with some steel plates around 3' X 2' and 1/8" thick (considerably thicker than the 1/64" typically used for plater reverbs) and was getting very gong-like sounds, even when bowed:



Fun fact: the sickly looking character in that video is Silas B from Madison who I ran into a few times when I lived there. It just happened to be the first video result that came up when I searched for "bowed gong". He had a lung transplant just before I moved, so I suspect that he is doing much better these days. http://silasritchie.bandcamp.com

Anyway, I'm excited about bowed-gong-like sounds.

Bought a couple of these last week, so audio testing will begin soon.