Video: How Does a Didgeridoo Work?

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How does a didgeridoo create sound? Learn the physics behind the operation of the didgeridoo in this free music lesson video from a professional musician and exotic instrument expert.

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Video Transcript

Very briefly I wanted to talk about the physics of the way this instrument works. I promise it will be very painless. There won't be any math involved, and you won't even be quizzed on it. As it turns out, all wind instruments like a trumpet or didgeridoo or a clarinet, they all work in fundamentally the same way. This is a hollow tube. What happens is by buzzing your lips into the end of it, you induce what's called a standing wave inside the instrument. It's like a pulsating calm of air inside this instrument. It begins with the lips. That's the thing that induces it. It's also known as the fundamental for this length of tubing. The pitch of that fundamental, the actual pitch that comes out of it, this is the basic sound of the instrument The pitch is determined by the length of this tube so that a longer tube will be a longer wave length, it's going to be lower pitch. A shorter tube would be shorter wave length and a higher pitch. The easy way to visualize this is if you think of a pipe organ in a church, which has a huge array of tubes of all sizes. Each one of those tubes works the same way as this tube. It's been cut to a certain length and each one of those tubes is each note in the chromatic scale. The easiest way to visualize that is to think of a pipe organ at a church, which has a huge array of tubes of all different sizes. Each one of those tubes works the same as this one. They've been cut to a certain length so that each one of those tubes represents one of the notes in the chromatic scale. There's been physical studies of exactly what goes on in an instrument like this one. It gets very complicated and we don't need to go into that detail. I think it's important to realize if that's fundamentally what you're doing here. By buzzing your lips you're going to create the standing wave inside the instrument and that all the other sounds that come out of it are based on things that you do with your mouth and your voice in combination with that standing wave.

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How Does a Didgeridoo Work?

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