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What if sound was about to have a revolution as big as the TV was for visual? It just takes a little imagination. The speaker is what we have today that makes sound. As an audio engineer for my friends, I am in charge of making good sounds. The most recent path I have been on is using xlr crossovers to feed prebuilt speakers their optimum frequency. Then having other speakers that specialize in other frequencies and adjusting their levels so they all play well together. Using distortion testing to find the optimym frequency range of each speaker. That is all well and good and can be dine now with off the shelf devices and I can make that happen now and I will. However I decided to just imagine an evoltion in sound producing devices. Why a speaker anyway? Speakers are not the be all end all of sound production. Some of the first sound producing devices were strings, tuning forks, vocal cords...etc. Basically all you need to produce sound is a vibrating object.
The revolution in music came when we could record and play back sound electronically, and create new sound blueprints electronically (and programatically). That was a huge revolution. But the necessary thing became we need to translate that bluepring of sound (file) into actually moving the air. It would be pretty hard to use strings and tuning forks to do this as they resonate and cant change frequency on a dime. Eventually we got to "voice coils" which are electronic coils that can use inductance to create minute motions. Couple this with a cone and these minute vibrations can turn into moving air at frequencies high enough to hear.
The problem is that it is just an inherently bad design. The one cone not only has to vibrate at basically an infinite amount of resonant freqeuncies which it is bad at, it also has change its frequency in a split second. One piece of material does all of this without even changing its properties. This makes for inherently bad results. The key is to break these processes into multiple stages or steps. We can look to nature to do this.
Step 1: diaphram. We are going to need to move air. Lets start with that. Our first stage moves large amounts of air rather slowly. The diaphram can be common to all chords or separate for each cord or any number of chords.
Step 2: vocal cords. The next step is to use this slowly moving air to cause something to resonate. In a creature there can be reallynonly 1 path for air so multiple different size vocal cords need to share the same opening. We are not restricted so we can have a single set of vocal cords for a certain frequency range per opening. The cords need to be able to both vibrate from air movement, and also to change length. This changing length will be what causes a change in frequency. There wull be bass chords that wull vibrate between say 20-50 hz, another set for say 50-100hz, another from 100-200, etc.
Step 3: throat. Now we need a valve to adjust the flow, increasing and decreasing the back pressure and also able to shut off sound. The throat may need to be before (and/or after) the cords in our device.
Step 4: mouth. Next all of the chords (or just one or any number) will output into a common (or separate or combination) resonant tuning chamber. In this chamber the frequencies from all the vibrating cords wil be combined, or kept separate, and the pitch changed for final ttuning of all.the cords or one of the cords or any number.
The point bieng that instead of one paper cone doing everything itself, we split the tasks required into 4 (or more or less) stages to make the system more robust, flexible, and responsive. And this will give the possibility of creating much vetter and less distorted sound.
Finally we need to mimic the choir; a wall of sound. Sound is delacate and from a point source, like light, it dissipates quickly. A 2D plane of sound (or ideally a solid or hollow sphere in 3D) is lossless in theory. We can do this by creating sound pixels and combining them into a sheet like a TV. Each "mouth" would be like a pixel. The diaphram(s) can be separate per pixel or feed several or many pixels but ideally multiple pixels per diaphram. Here is where we look to fractal design. So per diaphram we have multiple vibrating cords, and per vibrating cords we have multiple throats and mouths. If a throat is closed then that mouth (or sound pixel) wont sound. This can all be run hydraulically, mechanically, electrically, or any other way, the point is however it is run, the multiple stages will ensure a robust and pleasing output.
