Here’s a novel idea from the King’s College Choir:

In the video, one of the choristers gets help hitting a high note by taking a breath from a large helium balloon. (Obligatory warning: it’s dangerous to try this at home.)  So… does this actually work?  Does inhaling helium really make your voice higher?

In an earlier post, we looked at how the pitch of your voice depends on … Read the rest

The post Why Inhaling Helium Makes You Sound Like a Chipmunk appeared first on Tremblings and Warblings.

Here’s a recording of a woman reciting a line from the Catalan poem La Vaca Cega:

Speech-female.wav by xserra / CC BY.

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 took, … Read the rest

The post Digitally Transforming a Female Voice to a Male Voice appeared first on Tremblings and Warblings.

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.