hobby #224

Aeolian Harp Building and Wind-Tuning

Building a wind-played string instrument—a resonant soundbox strung with wires that the wind itself excites, no hands required. The craft is a double tuning problem: set each string's tension for its fundamental, then choose its diameter so the Kármán vortices shedding off it in the prevailing breeze fall on an audible harmonic. You end up tuning to the wind as much as to a pitch, tracking which strings sing at which wind speeds and reworking the soundbox and string gauges until a gust reads as a chord instead of a moan.

A Correct Instrument the Sky Refused to Play

Two dials aiming at one note: tension picks the pitch, string diameter aims the wind at it. I built a correct instrument, set it in the window—and the sky went dead calm.

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