What, would you say, is the main difference between a piano note and a flute note?  You might suggest that it has something to do with the shape of the note — a piano note is struck once and then simply held down, while a flute player has to actively blow throughout the duration of the note.

In part 2 of this series on what makes a musical sound, we … Read the rest

The post What Makes a Musical Sound Part 3 — Envelope and Playing Techniques appeared first on Tremblings and Warblings.

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.

Sine Waves

But first – what does … Read the rest

The post The Fourier Transform and the Spectrum appeared first on Tremblings and Warblings.

Here’s a violin playing the note G (with frequency 784 Hz), followed by a flute playing the same note:

Sounds from the Philharmonia Orchestra’s free sound samples / CC BY-SA 3.0.

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

The post What Makes a Musical Sound Part 2 – Tone Quality and Spectra appeared first on Tremblings and Warblings.

In a previous post we saw that sound is made up of waves of differing pressure in the air, caused by the vibration of air particles. Musical sounds are no exception – even the most intricate and exquisite chords are still encoded in the back-and-forth motion of the air particles that carry the wave from source to ear. What is it that makes some vibrations sound musical, while others sound … Read the rest

The post What Makes a Musical Sound Part 1 – Pitch and Loudness appeared first on Tremblings and Warblings.

In the novel The Phantom Tollbooth, the protagonist Milo journeys through a strange kingdom where the laws of nature, as we know them, do not quite hold. At one point he stumbles into the Valley of Sound, which has been completely enshrouded in silence since its Soundkeeper locked all sounds away in her fortress. Milo visits her in the fortress, the only … Read the rest

The post What is a Sound? appeared first on Tremblings and Warblings.