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

The post The Kinkiness of a Vibrating String 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.