Studying Acoustics

I’ve been practicing playing on a glockenspiel for 15 months almost every day for about 30 minutes. My wife complains that it gives her a headache, so I have to take it to a different room on the other side of the house. Usually, I take it to our bedroom, but 1 day the cat was napping in there, and I didn’t want to disturb him. I took the glockenspiel outside. The bells sounded weak outside–the wind seemed to carry the sound away. On another occasion I took my glockenspiel into the bathroom, and the bells sounded really strong and sharp–better than in the bedroom and far superior to the weak Tinkerbelle sound I produced outside. (I would never play a glockenspiel at an outdoor concert.) I knew the differing results were related to acoustics. Last week, I dove into a quick review of acoustics. In a physics college class I took over 40 years ago, it was the only chapter I understood, and a good grade on a test saved me from flunking the class. There was no internet then, and I couldn’t…