Well, it’s about time I actually post some pictures and videos on this topic.
So, again, here’s a link to Wikipedia’s article on Rubens’ Tubes. The long and the short of it is: Take a tube, put a speaker on one end, pipe propane into the other end, seal up the leaks, and then drill small, evenly spaced holes along the top of the tube. Turn on the gas, light it as it comes out of your little holes, and start playing stuff through the speaker.
Northwood managed to burn the speaker a little bit before I even got there. On the first day, we had 1/8″ holes every 1/2″; after some experimentation, we increased to 1/8″ holes every 1/4″. It was hard to balance the speaker’s power output against the pressure, so in a lot of cases you see parts of the fire going out, in some extreme cases, it puts the whole fire out. Trying to balance especially high speaker output against especially high pressure resulted in burst caulking at least once.
Anyway, here’s some pictures Wilmy took the first day, and then some pictures I took the next time we played with it.
We took a couple gigabytes of video. Right now, only six of the videos are available on YouTube, down below (that’s right, a first for this blog! YouTubularity!). These videos are mostly mathematical frequency progressions (not even musical progressions — I was defining frequencies based on wavelength rather than musical quality). We have a bunch where we actually used music, which are neat. Maybe I’ll get around to putting them up some other time.
Before you watch the videos, take a moment and congratulate SkaYoYo and Heeder on their second child, a son whom they have dubbed Ender! Hooray!
So, first, a frequency progression from the first day (1/2″ spacing), which Wilmbo filmed.
Second, two frequency progressions from the second day (1/4″ spacing), which I filmed using a tripod. For the second one, I tuned the frequencies to a range that worked well on the tube. Also, we turned out the lights.
Finally, three goofy videos of my little brother doing odd stuff.