Claviger: "Everything I’ve read indicates the opposite, the increasing diameter is used to increase the strength of the pulse sent back up to the valves.
With the short length of a single exhaust on the rocket the
muffler is a contributing factor and will act as part of the header secondary."
That would be incorrect. The largest pulse, but at a fixed frequency, is generated by the end of a square cut tube of constant cross-section. An increasing diameter cone will send back multiple pulses of gradually decreasing strength, instead of one strong reflection. Thus megaphones are used to broaden torque curves.
A perforated tube acts like a megaphone in that the gas velocity slows down as it progresses down the length (the increasing cross section area of a megaphone does the same thing). It is true that the center of the gas stream will be faster than the flow near the boundary layer on the internal wall, but the overall effect is to slow the gross flow down and disturb wave activity in both directions breaking large waves into chaotic patterns of small waves reflecting from every hole or protrusion into the flow stream. This is how it reduces measured decibels of sound.
The muffler indeed is part of either the collector or resonance chamber. Not all mufflers are created equal.
You can buy perforated sheet and with a little skill, cut, roll and weld your own tapered internal baffle to insert into one of those shiny SS megaphones.
Now the question is: At what taper, and how long???