Question

A musician hits a drum with a drumstick. In three to four sentences, explain the collision forces between the drum and drumstick.(4 points)

Answer 1

When the stick strikes the drumhead the two surfaces deform slightly and exert large, rapidly changing contact forces on each other; by Newton’s third law the drumhead pushes back on the stick with an equal and opposite force. The time-integral of that contact force (impulse) changes the stick’s and drumhead’s momenta and transfers kinetic energy into vibrational modes of the drumhead (plus some heat and sound). The peak force and duration depend on stiffness, mass, and damping of the stick and drumhead, which also shape the amplitude and timbre of the resulting sound.