Abstract
This paper describes musical scale generating mechanism of a steel drum which is made of a bottom of oil drum with many protuberances. Since the shapes of protuberances must be designed to generate natural frequencies which agrees with those of music scales, the steel drum generates musical scales when one hits the protuberances with a wooden stick.. In order to clarify the musical scale generating mechanism, FEM modal analysis of the steel drum is carried out based on a FE model obtained with shape measurement with a 3D-CMM. There exist modes of vibration in which the only a protuberance part vibrates at the natural frequency as same as the musical scale. Through the forced vibration analysis with impulse response and sound radiation analysis, sound pressure radiating from the steel drum can be reproduced.
