Re: [Harp-L] breaking - in, looking for a metallurgist

[Vern <jevern@xxxxxxx>]

The original question was: "Does 'breaking in' extend reed life?", NOT "Does 'breaking in' make the harp sound better?"
The former question could be answered without resorting to the subjective opinions of players but the latter question could not.

Sissy Jones in her article in HH claims that breaking-in extends reed life.  I challenge that claim.

"Breaking in" is defined as a brief, initial period of gentle playing. 

An informative test would be to break-in ten of 20 harps. Then place all of the reedplates on an air pump and run them until all (or at least half) of the reeds fail, recording the time of each failure.
If the mean time-to-failure of the broken-in reeds were significantly longer than that of the others, there would be an indication that breaking-in works.
Because such an experiment would be expensive and time consuming, I don't believe that it has been done.

The notion of breaking-in automobiles is long past.  Perhaps that is because the moving parts now fit better and the makers no longer leave debris in the engines.  In either case the reasons for breaking-in cars never applied to harmonicas. 

At this time, I can not find any theoretical, metallurgical support for the hypothesis that breaking-in extends reed life.  That said, I'm not an expert on the metallurgy of copper alloys and I have not done an exhaustive search of the literature.  If such an expert presented evidence that an initial period of low-stress cycling extended the fatigue life of brass or bronze, I would certainly be interested.

Vern

On May 26, 2010, at 2:37 AM, Patrick Killeen wrote:

> 
> You don't need a metallurgist to establish whether or not breaking 
> in a harmonica has a perceptible effect, an experiment to test the 
> theory could go along the these lines:
> 
> Give a harmonica player 10 new harmonicas to break in, keep an 
> identical set of 10 new harmonicas aside.
> 
> When the player has finished breaking in the harps you'll have 10  
> pairs consisting of one broken in harp and one matching brand new 
> harp.
> 
> Blindfold the harmonica player so that he can't see which are the 
> used harps and give him each of the pairs in turn, asking him two 
> questions:
> 1) Which of the two harmonicas is the one that was broken in?
> 2) Which of the harmonicas sounds better?
> 
> Repeat the above until you get a statistically significant set of 
> results.
> 
> If breaking in does make a significant difference then the players 
> will tend to identify the broken in harmonicas and say that they 
> have a better sound. 
> 
> If it turns out that breaking in harmonicas does have a perceptible 
> effect then it will be time to ask metallurgists to suggest possible 
> causes.  
> 
> How about it, are there any harp-lers out there looking for a 
> science project?
> 
> Regards
> 
> Patrick 		 	   		  
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