My tuner (No floating things this time, I promise.)

Here is my beautiful combination tuner metronome, which I use to attempt to stay in tune when I play my flute. The little pointer shows you if you are flat or sharp. There is also a little calibration thing in the top left corner that I never took much notice of before this. If you look VERY carefully, it says 440 Hz, the frequency of the sound waves. This means that the tuner thinks that A is 440 hz, or 440 cycles per second. The little calibration buttons allow me to change this (if I really wanted to tune myself to some weird key, I could.) Also, since the period is the reciprocal of the frequency, the period is 0.0023 seconds. The sound coming out of my flute is actually a compression and uncompression of air that travels in waves through the air. So although I'm blowing across the headjoint of my flute to make vibration and sound, this traveling air doesn't actually have anything to do with the sound that echoes around the room. At average room temperature, these waves would be traveling at 331 m/s, but the density of the silver in the flute is much greater than that of the air, so technically the sound travels through the flute itself much quickly than it travels through the air. This means that I could feel the vibration of the flute before I hear the sound itself... if I could hear a difference of milliseconds. Yay! Last blog before Christmas break!