Vent holes can acoustically cancel specific membrane modes by short-circuiting

Evidence

What if you could acoustically short-circuit the out-of-tune (0,1) mode, but not the others, suppressing the nonmusical partial? This is exactly what the vent hole could do, at least in theory. A 64 Hz (0,1) mode has a wavelength of over 5 meters; the distance between the membrane and the vent is under 1 meter. While the membrane is being struck, it creates a rarefaction just above itself, due to the excitation mainly of the (0,1) mode. This is partly canceled by the compression coming out the vent, if it is open. Remember that the higher modes do not short-circuit in the same way, so the undesirable (0,1) mode is uniquely affected, leaving the more harmonic partials to create a pitch. — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 1416

Categorization

• QUESTION: Rossing’s empirical finding (no audible difference) seems to contradict the elegant 5-meter-wavelength short-circuit theory — worth investigating why the theory fails in practice.
• SEED: A piece on how acoustic short-circuiting works (and fails) as a mode-suppression strategy — the gap between elegant theory and what the ear actually hears.