Welcome to Tremblings and Warblings, a blog about the science of music. Here I write about musical instruments, music technology (old and new), how we interact with music, and anything else that catches my fancy.
Where to Start:
If you’d like to start with an introduction to the physics of music, check out this series of posts:
1. What is a Sound?
2. What Makes a Musical Sound Part 1 – The Basics
3. What Makes a Musical Sound Part 2 – Tone Quality and Spectra
4. What Makes a Musical Sound Part 3 – Envelope and Playing Techniques
5. The Fourier Transform and the Spectrum
If you’re more interested in somewhat obscure historical music technology, here are a few posts:
The Voice in the Soot: Humanity’s Earliest Known Recording
The Mechanical Talking Head: An Early Speech Synthesiser
The Blog Title:
The name of this blog comes from this prescient passage from Francis Bacon’s 1627 work The New Atlantis:
We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds, and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter-sounds, and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have, together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep; likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear do further the hearing greatly. We have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as it were tossing it: and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller, and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.
The header and background images are also inspired by this passage.
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