So, let's switch gears a few minutes, and I want to talk about something called
resonance. And, resonance will have it has, an
important impact in, in many aspects of our life.
you know, probably one of the simple things that you can think about In terms
of resonance, for those of you who ride in an automobile, there's a suspension
system. If you were to look under the car,
there's a spring that mounts is part of the suspension system mounting the wheels
to the automobile. And, if you drive down the road, if you
hit a bump, you'll feel the car kind of oscillate a little bit.
And then as the road flattens out, it, it It will, you know, so will your response
to the automobile, well, that's a resonance, okay?
And, but resonances happen mechanically, they happen actually, you know, we can
think about a resonance of electrical circuits, and we'll talk about that a
little bit later. And Mark will cover that I'm sure.
And we can also talk about resonance in acoustic space.
And the, the example that I wanted to discuss is the Helmholtz Resonator.
Named after Helmholtz so you can look up under Wikipedia to learn about his
contributions to, acoustics. But the Helmholtz resonator we have to
make a few assumptions before we, we talk about it.
But it, basically what we're interested in is, is a bottle here and this bottle
has a, a, a neck on it Right here, and basically the, the mass
of the air, that's in this neck of the bottle here, moves as a unit.
it's as if it's a plug, moving up and down in the neck of the bottle.
All right, and then we have a volume of the bottle here
And that volume of the bottle ends up in the cavity, in this open bottle, creates
or provides a stiffness. we also have a surface area of the neck
of the bottle, so, the, the're going to have a length associated with this neck
of the bottle. We're going to have a surface area of the
opening, so S of the, of the port here of the bottle, and then the volume.
Alright? And, there are a few assumptions that are
important in thinking about the bottle, one is the wavelength of sound.
for the Helmholtz's resonator effect to apply, the wavelength of the sound must
be much greater than, L the length, the fluid in the neck.
And that way the fluid in the neck moves in a unit mass, like I was describing.
the wavelength also had to be much greater than the, third root of the
volume. and when that's the case, the acoustic
pressure in the cavity provides an actual stiffness.
And then, of course, if the wavelength is much greater than the square root of the
surface area. The opening of the bottle then radiates
like a simple sound source. Alright?
And the analogy is a mass-spring system. Okay?
And just like the string that I showed earlier, if I were to displace this mass
by some fixed amount of distance, we would get oscillation.
And the mass would vibrate up and down against the spring.
That's basically what happens in the Helmholtz resonator.
Now before we go on to talk about the mathematics simple mathematics relatively
behind the Helmholtz resonator, I thought I would would demonstrate the effect for
you. Since we've been talking about the
Helmholtz resonator, a little bit, I thought it might be fun to demonstrate
it. And I thought maybe before I demonstrate
it, I would tell you a story, my father, when he was little.
Basically had to he had to always take the milk bottle back and have it refilled
at the local store. at that point in time you didn't buy
milk, you know, plastic containers they were all glass bottles.
And so you returned the glass bottle and, and you'd get a new one or have it
refilled. he took the bottle back to the store one
night, and he was little and it was kind of dark outside.
And he noticed as he was walking along, there was something howling, and he
became scared, so he started running. And he told me, the faster he ran, the
louder it howled. what he was really running from was a
Helmholtz resonator, he thought he was running from a ghost.
but I thought it was a funny story and I wanted you to hear the sound of a bottle
in resonance. And we, you know, we're talking about
this a little bit, you end up having a neck the neck of the, the, the air in
the, the, in the volume here, actually will vibrate like a mass.
And it's actually the reason why we can think about using a port in a ported
loudspeaker design, because we can tune that port so that it actually radiates.
The volume of air that sits in the bottle itself inside of here, and I have water
in here as well right now, but the volume of air that sits in the bottle actually
serves as the spring. And so if I blow across the top of the
bottle, [SOUND] you can hear, [SOUND] a particular frequency.
And that frequency is associated with the resonance of this mass column of air
that's moving against this spring that's in the bottle.
Now, [SOUND] let's see if we can change [COUGH] change the frequency.
You hear a lower frequency. You hear a lower frequency because now
the volume of air in the bottle is much larger now.
And because of that, the spring stiffness changes, and it's actually more
compliant. So, the mass of the, in the, of the air
moving in the neck hasn't changed, what we've done is, basically, made a softer
spring, and so that lowers the frequency, [SOUND].
[SOUND] Hear the changes. That's the basics of the Helmholtz
resonator, and it's incredibly applicable to speaker design, both in thinking about
how the spring stiffness is defined by the volume.
The volume of the box you build will actually serve as a spring.
If you use a port, it's kind of like the neck of the bottle.
So there's a lot of great relationships between the Helmholtz resonator concept
and speaker design. Okay, with that demonstration in place,
let's, let's talk a little bit about how we could calculate the resonant frequency
for a given bottle. So first, the mass the mass of the volume
of the air moving is represented as shown here.
It's the density of the air, the surface area, and the length.
So. S times L and [INAUDIBLE] L, this L prime
is in a, is what we call an effective length of the neck.
And a is the radius of the opening, so the effective length is related to the