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I'd like an explanation, for the first ' l '. [+] |
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{Go ahead and delete this, [MB], and no-one will *ever* know...} |
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It whistles (or to be more accurate, throbs subsonically), whilst you ascend and descend? |
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I'm reasonably familiar with the swanee whistle - but where do the people get on and off? There's only one access hole in the whistle, say on floor seven - so someone could get on at 7, ride all the way down accompanied by a descending tone, and then ride all the way back up again to get off at seven, accompanied by an ascending tone. Or is the whistle aspect separate to the getting on and off function of the lift, providing just the noise? Going horizontal for a moment, could this same concept be used for the tube? |
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Slupernumery "l" deleted. |
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The elevator car (or, to be correct, lift carriage) acts as
the stopper in the whistle (or, to use the old English
sheep-farming term, whilstle). |
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The whistle part itself is housed at one end or the other of
the shaft, powered either by compressed air or by
prevailing wind. |
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If you really want me to fill in all the details, I will have to
increase my fee. |
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ah, so not calling an elevator by whistling an Old American Folk Tune then... very subsonic. |
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Thumbs go... phweeeeeeeeep up
[+] |
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I'm thinking more sub-sonic bass pipe organ note than whistle. |
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Strange. I'm thinking more helium than air. |
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Cold air, or hot air ... ? |
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You could have a basket of swanee whistles by each door, and a swanee-whistle-blowing lift attendant; each passenger would be obliged to indicate their desired destination by whistling the appropriate pitches. The attendant would whistle the current floor. Anyone trying to cheat by speaking or not whistling would be pushed out at the boiler-room level. |
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I had to look up swanee whistle. |
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// I had to look up swanee whistle. // |
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Drop your pants and assume the position ... |
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Yes! [+]
Should be *nearly* subsonic like a very large ship's whistle.
<link> |
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"Thank you SIR, may I please have another SIR" |
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Come on. Middle C (approx 264hz) is produced by a closed organ pipe one foot long |
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The lower audible limit is suggested to be about 20hz, which would be not quite 4 octaves lower, produced by a closed pipe 16 feet long |
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The Queen Mary fog horn appears to be about 68hz, about 2 octaves below middle C. (i.e. produced by a 4 foot closed pipe, though I imagine the actual horn is more likely to be an 8 foot open pipe) |
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Either your building is not very tall or your pitches are going to be well below the auditory threshold. I'm thinking a 1 or 2 Hz "whump...whump...whump..." |
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You could of course raise the overall pitch of the whilstle one octave if you made the top or bottom end of the shaft open to the air, and installed the fipple on the lift car itself. |
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Could it be designed to have higher harmonics? |
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It could, if it were a lift for bees. |
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[pocmloc] tell me if this works: |
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The elevator/lift shaft functions not as an organ *pipe* but
as an organ *chest* -- that is, 1) it supplies compressed air
to the pipes and 2) it's a resonating chamber. |
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Mount a bank of organ pipes on the roof. They must be
multiple, and their pitches separated by intervals that are
small (probably) and nonstandard (certainly). |
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As the car ascends, it drives air through the pipes. They
resonate with the shaft-space between the roof pipes and
the top of the car, which, of course, changes its length.
As it changes, different pipes come into and out of
resonance. |
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As the car moves, the pitch is constant, but the timbre
changes.
Other details are left as an exercise for the reader. |
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It would be a technical challenge to design & build this so
it sounded at least interesting. It would require an
outstanding artist-engineer to build it so it sounded *good* |
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An alternative alternative would be to have two shafts:
the
main lift shaft, and a parallel shaft of small diameter. |
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In the small shaft, place a steel plunger; attach a powerful
magnet to the lift car itself, so that the two of them move
in
synch, in their respective shafts. Then, indeed, the lift
car
in its shaft can provide the air-pumping for the swanee
mechanism, whilst the plunger in the small parallel shaft
will
determine the [elevator]-pitch. |
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Obviously, there is also the alternative route of
constructing a 20-storey accordion, with the floor-selector
buttons determining the notes. But the main problem
with that would be the accordion-like noise it might make. |
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//A little more dev and you have the talking floor
indicator.// |
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Listen, MaxCo is more of a concept-origination outfit than an
engineering department.... |
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//Wonder why kind of voice you can synthesize without
electronics ?// <link> |
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[+]
But what will provide the accompanying kazoo sound, without which the Whistlevator would be like chalk without cheese? Could alternate lift shafts be Whistlevators and Kazoovators? |
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Perhaps adjacent office blocks could have whistlevators and
kazoovators. Inter-company cooperation could then be
encouraged as a means to outer, as well as inner, harmony. |
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"But wait. This elevator doesn't have any buttons to indicate hwat floor I want to go to!?"
"That's because you have to whistle."
"Eh?"
"Yep. If you want the first floor then it's a low pitch... <phuuuu>; if you want the top then it's a high pitch <pheeeeeeeeee>. This corresponds to the whistle made by the elevator."
"..."
"You know how to whistle, don't you?" etc. |
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[mousey], I am not an expert but I suspect the resonant properties of the wind chest changing size will provide a much less pronounced effect than the rise and fall in pressure as the lift ascends and descends. I doubt that it would correlate sensibly and artistically with the lift height to be useful in this idea. |
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High harmonics might be possible but I would suspect in practice that they would be impossible to sound due the the wide bore of the lift shaft and the clutter of the mechanism. |
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Here's a question about whistles/flutes in general - what is it about the position/shape/size of the _V___ hole that creates the standing wave necessary to produce the sound? i.e. what stops the air in the system from leaving the system nice and cleanly? |
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In a trumpet (and some jazz-flautist styles) the reverberations are "seeded" by generating a "brrr" noise with the lips - and in reeded instruments, I guess Bernoulli forces cause the reed to oscillate in a seeding manner - but what about in the static holes in whistles - there's no macroscopic oscillation in the structure of the instrument itself - so where does the wave come from? |
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[+] - Wants to know what the sub-sub-sub basement sounds like. |
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[zen_tom] Fourier's in there somewhere, too.
(Seeding - fautists/trumpet players hum to get some effects ) |
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//Fourier's in there somewhere, too// |
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He's hiding in the kitchen Sinc. |
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//kitchen sinc// - which reminds me of another oscillation-in-tube situation, when old plumbing "bangs" when turning the tap, or as liquid flows through the radiators - same process as a whistle (i.e. a standing wave generated somehow in the pipes) just at a much lower frequency? |
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I don't think so. The whistle noise comes from the act of the air escaping the vessel (??), but the water banging (Water Hammer link) is the vibration caused by the shockwave of the sudden acceleration of the water *within* the pipe system. |
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[bigsleep] Cheers. And I still have unlimited access to all
the chemical suppliers known to mankind. It's going to be a
good year. |
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// what is it about the position/shape/size of the _V___ hole
that creates the standing wave necessary to produce the
sound? // |
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I think it's caused by a series of vortices. The air hits the far
edge of the hole, and can either go above or below it. It
forms vortices which alternately go above and below the
edge (ie, outside and inside the flute), and each vortex leads
to a "pulse" in air pressure. |
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