From Philip Ball
Commenting on my feature, “Mingle bells” (13 December, p 40), Godfrey Dack points out that the wavelength of the fundamental vibration of a stretched string is equal not to its length but to twice its length (24 January, p 29). He is quite right. The confusion arises because a different nomenclature is used for bells and string. For a bell, the lowest-frequency harmonic is called the hum, and the so-called fundamental has double the frequency of the hum. Presumably, the dynamics of the vibrating bell are such that the first overtone turns out to be far more audible than the hum – so that’s the pitch we tend to assign to the bell and call the fundamental.
London, UK
