Music and sound
Where is the sound coming from? © Barbara Sigge
Noises, sounds, tones
“Music has to do with noise”, as Wilhelm Busch aptly put it. But what are noise and sound? Why do we hear something – or not? And what are we actually hearing?
All kinds of acoustic sounds reach our ears. Whether we call it noise. sound or tone depends on the shape of the sound waves. Banging and rustling generate irregular waves; we hear a noise. But when a plucked guitar string or the column of air in a pipe oscillates regularly we hear the typical sound of the instrument, which usually has a particular pitch. And a tuning fork makes a clear, pure tone where the waves are sinusoidal.
Psychoacoustics – how do we hear our surroundings?
How do we know where a sound comes from? What pitches do we have to be able to hear, and how loud, in order to be able to speak to each other? Which intervals sound pleasant? And which do not?
Many things we normally take for granted are based on complex physical phenomena. You can find out about some of them here.
Technical music
Music is not just art. Technical music in particular has much to do with physics. Here you can find out about that for yourself using the many experiments and instruments. Trace the development of automated (and digitalized) sound from the dynamophone, etherophone and trautonium to the modern synthesizer.