This is your Webmaster, Will, reporting live from the Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, where, tomorrow morning, a group of researchers from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Brigham Young University will be presenting one of the first comprehensive studies of the acoustics of the Hammered Dulcimer.

Modal response and sound radiation from a hammered dulcimer. Benjamin Y. Christensen, Kent L. Gee, Brian E. Anderson, and Alan
T. Wall (Dept. of Phys. and Astron., Brigham Young Univ., N283 ESC,
Provo, UT 84602, ukeben@gmail.com)

They’ve found, among other things, that in a 16/15 Hammered Dulcimer, the lowest frequencies are a bit too low to be adequately amplified by existing dulcimer bodies, and that the soundholes on the wire-side of the instrument serve a bigger purpose than decoration alone, significantly radiating lots of important frequencies of sound. These findings may seem elementary to us Dulcimer players, but it’s a wonderful thing to see the acoustics community stepping up to study this delightful instrument.

More than anything, it’s nice to meet a few other people at a conference who actually know what a hammered dulcimer is!