Eli5 – Why are drums round? Is it something to do with the shape that determines the ability to hit something and get a percussive sound out of stretched materials?

Question

Eli5 – Why are drums round? Is it something to do with the shape that determines the ability to hit something and get a percussive sound out of stretched materials?

In: 64

Answer 1

I absolutely cannot Explain Like You’re 5. However, a very interesting approach to this question is summarized (also not like you’re 5) in the Wikipedia article here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_the_shape_of_a_drum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_the_shape_of_a_drum).

So the answer is that, no matter what the shape of the drum, you’ll get a sound. (If not, basically all of physics doesn’t work.) The question is “what sound?” Since any function can “obviously” be decomposed into a sum of sines and cosines, this is just a question of Fourier Transforms. (Note that Fourier wrote that this was obvious over 200 years ago and it’s still one of the hottest areas of mathematical research. When a mathematician writes that something is obvious, it sometimes opens up thousands of jobs.)