A Blog on the Science of Music and Speech
Here’s a super-slow-motion video of a vibrating violin string:
Video by Jost Fischer.
I think this is pretty cool — there’s this kink that’s travelling up and down the length of the string. What’s going on here, and why don’t we see this with the naked eye? In this post I’ll explain how a bowed string vibrates, and how, unintuitive as it seems, the odd kinky motion of the … Read the rest
Here’s a recording of a woman reciting a line from the Catalan poem La Vaca Cega:
Suppose that you wanted to take the recording and change the quality of the voice — change it into a male-sounding voice, for instance. How would you go about it? I did this recently for an online audio processing course I … Read the rest
In What Makes a Musical Sound Part 2, I talked about the spectrum, which shows what frequencies are present in a sound. In this explicative post, I’ll go into more detail about how we obtain the spectrum, and about what it means when we say a sound is made up of different frequencies.
But first – what does … Read the rest
Here’s a violin playing the note G (with frequency 784 Hz), followed by a flute playing the same note:
In part 1 of this series on what makes a musical sound, we looked at two basic properties of a musical note – its pitch and loudness. Since these two notes … Read the rest
