[ExI] Musical instruments in space

David Lubkin lubkin at unreasonable.com
Fri Mar 8 14:01:13 UTC 2013


Spike wrote:

>Excellent question.  Ron McNair took a saxophone into orbit in 1984:

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is on ISS with a Larrivée acoustic guitar.
He has recorded music on ISS and is working on an album. The microgravity
affects his playing: He has to look at his left hand to see what fret he's at.
I think that he'd adapt over time.

>Aboard the space station, no modifications would 
>be needed: the ISS uses an atmosphere very close 
>to the same one we have down here.  I know for a 
>fact that weightlessness wouldn't effect a reed instrument at all

I'm really asking not about exclusively the current ISS and a lunar colony but
the full range of off-Earth conditions we might encounter and want to play
unprocessed acoustic instruments in — microgravity through ~1.8g,
apparent gravity varying during the course of a playing session, lower or
higher air pressure, different air composition, etc.

Of course, you'd better pack enough reeds to last you on one-way trips to
Mars or Ganymede. At least until you've perfected a variety of Arundo
donax that will yield decent reeds in the space and growing conditions
available.

If you imagine, say, a perpetual farewell concert tour for a rock group and
a symphony orchestra that makes the circuit of settlements from Mercury
to the Kuiper Belt (planetary, lunar, asteroid, constructed habitat, and
major vessels) in a vanilla 1940s sf formulation (that is, we settle
everywhere, we're substantially the same physically, and no MNT), you'd
probably want your instruments to be more adjustable than they are now.

My SWAG is that variations in air pressure would make the most
difference. That it wouldn't be hard to make something thicker or wider
or longer to compensate but I'm not sure how to adapt an instrument
so it's still acoustic, plays the same, sounds the same, in either of two
or more substantially different air pressures without MNT.

Maybe the answer for that is mostly interchangeable parts, e.g., a set
of thicker strings you use in low-pressure environments, and construction
techniques that support a greater range of string tensions.


-- David.





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