[ExI] Musical instruments in space

[spike]

On 08/03/2013 05:12, David Lubkin wrote:
> What musical instruments would need to be altered or played 
> differently in order to sound the same when played on the space 
> station or a lunar colony? (Because of the lower gravity and the lower 
> air pressure.)


I forgot to mention, I once whoofed a couple lungfuls of helium and played
the sax.  The pitch goes up, pretty similarly to the way it makes your voice
higher.  What we should do then is go up to the hyperbaric chamber at
Stanford and see what the instrument sounds like at 2 atmospheres.  I
imagine it would be lower, since horns play flat when it is cold outside:
the air is denser.  I would suppose it would take 4 atmospheres in the HB
chamber to get the instrument to play a full octave lower, but you know
what, David you have one hell of an idea there.  A baritone sax is an octave
lower than an alto sax, but the bari has big clumsy keys.  You can fly like
the wind on an alto, since the pads don't need to be pressed as far, and
they are closer together.  If you want to play a trio with alto, tenor and
baritone, you could use a sound on sound recorder and a hyperbaric chamber,
with only the one horn, the fast one.

I don't know how that would work with brass instruments.

Surely someone somewhere has played a reed instrument in a hyperbaric
chamber.

spike