Acoustical analysis of musical pillar of great stage of Vitthala temple at Hampi, India

In this paper, we present the spectral analysis of the sound recorded from a musical pillar at Vitthala temple, Hampi - a world heritage site. The pillars in this temple have musical columns which produce sounds of different musical instruments when struck with a thumb (i.e., a kind of impulse-like excitation). The sound recorded from a pillar is found to produce bell-like sound. In addition, an analysis is presented to model dynamics of such columns in a pillar to find the flexural frequencies along with its eigenmodes. It was observed that there is close correlation between spectral (i.e., resonance) characteristics of bell-like sound from pillar and actual bell sound. The measured frequencies of pillar have also been found to be in close agreement with flexural frequencies derived from Euler-Bernoulli beam model and energy separation algorithm (ESA) based on Teager's energy operator. This model correctly predicts the resonant frequencies of the bell-like sound from the musical columns of the pillar.