Materials
Wind chimes can be made of materials other than metal or wood and in shapes other than tubes or rods. Other wind chimes materials include glass, bamboo, shell, stone, earthenware, stoneware and porcelain. More exotic items, such as silverware or cookie cutters, can also be recycled to create wind chimes. The selected material can have a large impact on the sound a wind chime produces. The sounds produced by recycling objects such as these are not tunable to specific notes and range from pleasant tinkling to dull thuds. The sounds produced by properly sized wind chime tubes are tunable to notes, as discussed in the external link below. As aluminum is the common metal with the lowest internal damping, wind chimes are often made from aluminum to achieve the longest and loudest sounding chime.
The tone will depend on factors such as the material, the exact alloy, and heat treatment and the use of a solid cylinder or a tube. If a tube is used, the wall thickness also has an impact on the tone. Tone may also depend on the hanging method. The tone quality will also depend on the material of the object that is used to hit the chimes.
With clay wind chimes, the higher the final firing temperature required, the higher and more ringing the tone will be. Lower fired earthenware clay produces a duller sound than higher fired stoneware clay. Stoneware wind chimes are also more durable and able to resist stronger winds without suffering chipping or damage.
Read more about this topic: Wind Chime
Famous quotes containing the word materials:
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“The competent leader of men cares little for the niceties of other peoples’ characters: he cares much—everything—for the exterior uses to which they may be put.... These are men to be moved. How should he move them? He supplies the power; others simply the materials on which that power operates.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)