“Some players compared the sound to a cookie tray hitting the top of a car,” said Daniel Russell, a professor of acoustics at The Pennsylvania State University. “It was such a different -- some say annoyingly loud -- sound, it raised eyebrows.”
Russell and his graduate student Peter Kerrian set out to find the cause of the offensive clang. They had analyzed a variety of clubs from recent years and the “noisy club” stood out as a particularly interesting test case.
The researchers tracked the clanging sound to vibrations in the bottom of the club head, called the sole, that were strongest in the most sensitive range of human hearing.
The researchers will present their results at the 171st meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held May 23-27 in Salt Lake City.
Russell has long studied the acoustics of sports equipment, including baseball bats, tennis rackets and hockey sticks. He says sound is one of the major considerations for players in selecting equipment. “They want to hear the sound and be able to get a sense of the quality of the hit,” he said.
In the case of the new driver, the sound not only didn’t match expectations, it annoyed people.
“The sound had peaks in the 2-3 kilohertz range. The human ear is very sensitive to this range,” Kerrian said. He compared the sound to the tin-can ping of an aluminum baseball bat, another grating sound for sports aficionados.
To get at the source of the golf club’s clang, the researchers tested it in their lab and measured its vibrations. They also asked members of the Penn State golf team to hit some balls with the club, and recorded the sounds.
The scientists matched the vibrational modes of the club to the recorded sounds. They found that the annoyingly loud component could be matched to a natural vibration of the bottom part of the club head. The large size of the club head compared to traditional drivers meant it radiated the 2-3 kilohertz range very effectively, Russell said.
The researchers say the club could likely be redesigned to muffle the sound without sacrificing its forgiveness of off-center hits if acoustical analysis plays a role in the design. This might be done by integrating different materials that absorb the peak frequencies. They are starting collaborations with golf club manufacturers and say acoustical analysis could serve an important role in future equipment development.
“Some of the newest clubs, which are made of lightweight composite materials, have the opposite problem in that they’re almost too quiet,” Russell said.
The tools of acoustical science could help designers find the “sweet spot” that merges top-notch performance with solid sound, and no annoying, cookie-sheet clangs.
Presentation #2pSAa4, "The problem of the noisy golf club," by Daniel A. Russell will be take place on Tuesday, May 24, 2016, at 2:05 p.m. MDT in Salon E. The abstract can be found by searching for the presentation number here: http://acousticalsociety.org/content/spring-meeting-itinerary-planner. ###
ABOUT THE MEETINGThe 171st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) will be held May 23-27, 2016, at the Salt Lake Marriott Downtown at City Creek Hotel. It will feature more than 900 presentations on sound and its applications in physics, engineering, music, architecture and medicine. Reporters are invited to cover the meeting remotely or attend in person for free. USEFUL LINKSMain meeting website: http://acousticalsociety.org/content/spring-2016-meetingItinerary planner and technical program: http://acousticalsociety.org/content/spring-meeting-itinerary-planner
WORLD WIDE PRESS ROOMIn the coming weeks, ASA’s World Wide Press Room will be updated with additional tips on dozens of newsworthy stories and with lay-language papers, which are 400-900 word summaries of presentations written by scientists for a general audience and accompanied by photos, audio, and video. You can visit the site, beginning in early May, at (http://acoustics.org/current-meeting). PRESS REGISTRATIONWe will grant free registration to credentialed journalists and professional freelance journalists. If you are a reporter and would like to attend, contact John Arnst ([email protected], 301-209-3096) who can also help with setting up interviews and obtaining images, sound clips, or background information. LIVE MEDIA WEBCASTA press briefing featuring a selection of newsworthy research will be webcast live from the conference on Tuesday, May 24. Topics and time of webcast to be announced. ABOUT THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICAThe Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world's leading journal on acoustics), Acoustics Today magazine, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. For more information about ASA, visit our website at http://www.acousticalsociety.org.
###
Meeting Link: 171st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
RSS