| Got (Video) Game? - Science Insider
Reported September 2009
ENGINEERING "AUDIBALL": The Audiball video game adapts a common video game guitar-style controller by assigning new actions to its buttons, opening the device to completely new uses. Players manipulate the controllers to shoot balls at a target, which changes the music. The designers included many unique challenges among the different levels.
WHAT IS PITCH: Sound waves are pressure waves. A vibrating object creates a disturbance in the surrounding air, much like a stone cast in a quiet pond will cause waves to ripple outward from the spot where the stone hit. All sound waves have wavelength and frequency. Objects that vibrate very quickly create short wavelengths and a high-pitched sound. Objects that vibrate very slowly create long wavelengths and a low-pitched sound. Frequency measures the speed of vibration in a unit called a Hertz (Hz), and 1 Hz is equivalent to 1 vibration per second. Pluck a string on a guitar and it might vibrate 500 times per second, so the sound wave's frequency would be 500 Hertz. Frequencies within the range of human hearing -- from about 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz -- have a discernable pitch.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.-USA, and the Mathematical Association of America contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.
If you would like more information, please contact:
David Terraso
Media Relations Specialist for the Colleges of Computing, Liberal Arts and Sciences
Georgia Institute of Technology
(404) 385-2966
david.terraso@comm.gatech.edu
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
IEEE
Pender McCarter
IEEE http://www.ieee.org
IEEE-USA http://www.ieeeusa.org
p.mccarter@ieee.org
Ivars Peterson
Mathematical Association of America,
Washington, DC 20036-1358
(800) 741-9415
http://www.maa.org
ipeterson@maa.org
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