@Techaltar in my first job in the semiconductor industry I worked with wafers pretty often, and one time I accidentally dropped one on the floor.

It made the most incredible sound.

The wafers are nearly perfect crystals, so when it hit the ground it sounded like glass breaking, except at only one frequency. Absolutely bizarre sound. I'll never forget it.

My point is, if you've got a spare, you should try dropping it on a hard floor. But also understand it's a real pain to clean up. 😁

@whitequark “this is Catherine to me” — me when I first read about the shattering wafer

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Would you mind recording the sound and sharing the recording (or a picture of the spectrogram)?

@whitequark @0xabad1dea

I also don't really know, but a recording with a smartphone's microphone is unlikely to have significant harmonics at reasonable volumes (I once looked at recorded spectra of sweeps generated by a PC speaker, and they appeared fine modulo diminishing response as the frequency increased) and has some sort of reasonable frequency response up to ~15kHz. What I find most interesting here is what kind of frequency peaks are there, so the potentially-nonflat frequency response is not that important either.

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