Basketballs as spherical acoustic cavities

The sound field resulting from striking a basketball is found to be rich in frequency content, with over 50 partials in the frequency range of 0-12 kHz. The frequencies are found to closely match theoretical expectations for standing wave patterns inside a spherical cavity. Because of the degenerate nature of the mode shapes, explicit identification of the modes is not possible without internal investigation with a microphone probe. A basketball proves to be an interesting application of a boundary value problem involving spherical coordinates.