Walking the Evo this morning, I fantasized again about maybe some day revolutionizing the world of music. I have no idea what that would entail. I've thought before about learning more about synthesized sound and doing something totally un-thunk of. I had a chance to work for Moog before the place grew into what it is now, when Robert was still alive. I didn't appreciate what he was doing then, so I stuck with my job. I still would love to research and invent, but the corporate culture would probably not fit me. They're really into marketing to the new generations, which means their marketing staff always seems to wear black, etc. Don't get me wrong, I really like Mike Adams. He's somewhat of a hero because he's such a business genius. I just would prefer a quiet, worker-ant life for myself.

I thought of the Moog guitar, and then my mind went to thinking an invention in the acoustic (unplugged) realm might be more appreciated. I went back to another fantasy of studying cathedrals and even the instructions for Solomon's Temple to see if there were among the instructions lost knowledge about acoustic design, some freaky thing like walls located at multiples of quarter wavelengths for all tones on the pentatonic C major scale or something. A smaller thing would be taking this down to a single instrument, and I thought of Justin's guitar with the uncentered sound hole.

That led my disordered thought process back to the ellipse. A former boss wrote a paper on, "the focusing property of an ellipse." I didn't think much of it at the time, as it was totally geometric, without an engineering angle. But, thinking how all linear representations of waves reflect through one or the other focus, I wondered what would happen in an elliptical instrument, like a lute, with a sound hole over a focus (or, as I write this, even a sound hole over both). Then, I thought of the sound hole and assumed an analogy to Babinet's principle surely happened at the edges. That made me appreciate how this is minimized, as Mike taps and strums in-tune. Surely, the sound hole has no effect on tapping. What would a Babinet compensator for a guitar's sound hole look like, and would it be worth a flip.

I got to thinking about the source of my insanity: How I assumed light was created by an excitation and de-excitation of an electron, which was an oscillating charge; and so wondered why Hertzian dynamics did not also apply. (Don't repeat that sentence. It's like a death sentence. You sound much more credible if you say, "Light is the bending of space with muons and pions dancing in and out of time through wormholes and tunnels and interacting with quarks through multidimensional synthesis. Einstein said so." It matters not that the former explains all optical phenomena in undergraduate physics texts and the latter is word salad with no physical interpretation. Just try it sometime and see what happens.) So, thinking as crazy simpletons do, that light was oscillation of charge and sound was oscillation of mass; I asked what kind of optical phenomena could we transfer to acoustic analogs. I wondered what an acoustic hologram might be. Then, I got distracted, probably remembering some heavy insult somebody lodged at me and got all into self-persecution, and forgot to get back to trying to help humanity.

So, to make a long story short, I was wondering if anybody could comment about a string instrument with an elliptical design, sized to match multiples of wavelengths (or halves thereof) of a majority of notes in today's scales, and having holes with Babinet compensation over the foci.

No. Seriously.