ON HOW PHYSICS IS INVOLVED IN
Music
• All musical instruments create sound by causing matter
to vibrate. The vibrations start sound waves moving
through the air. Most musical instruments use resonance
to amplify the sound waves and make the sounds louder.
Resonance occurs when an object vibrates in response to
sound waves of a certain frequency
HOW INSTRUMENTS CREATE MUSIC
EXPLANATION
• One of the best museums I visited last year was the
Haus der Musik – Sound Museum in Vienna. It is an amazing place
where you can among other things compose your own music
and try to conduct the famous Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
But there was one part of the exhibition that I enjoyed even
more, the one about instruments. By standing in a giant mouth
piece for wind instruments or a giant hollow percussion body
you could experience first hand how music is created. And yes,
it has everything to do with physics and science.
EXPLANATION
• Sound is created when an object vibrates. The vibrations cause the
particles in the air around the object to vibrate too. The particles in
the air then bump into their neighbors setting them into a vibrating
motion as well which lets the vibration travel further. For this reason,
sound is often defined as vibrations that travel through air and are
detected by a human’s or animal’s ear. But it should be said here that
the medium does not necessarily have to be air. Whale ears, for
example, pick up vibrations that are transported through water. In
physics, vibrations are commonly described as waves.
EXPLANATION
• Special about music instruments is that they create so-called
standing waves instead of random vibrations. In a standing
wave some points, the nodes, of the vibration remain fixed
while the rest vibrates with maximum amplitude which refers
to the highest and the lowest points of the wave. It is these
standing waves that we experience as harmonic tones when
listening to music. Other irregular, random waves that are not
standing, we hear as noise instead.
EXPLANATION EXAMPLE
• The properties of the vibration’s standing wave can tell us how we
experience the tone. One important property of waves in physics is
their frequency which describes how many waves pass one point during
a specific time. The larger the frequency, the more waves pass the point
and the more high-pitched we experience the tone. In contrast, the
smaller the frequency, the less waves pass and the lower the tone
sounds. The amplitude (remember the highest and lowest points of the
wave), on the other hand, tells us how loud a tone is. The larger the
amplitude, the higher the wave and the louder the tone sounds,
whereas a smaller amplitude gives a softer tone.
EXAMPLE
