Search

What is meant by the words used in a subjective judgment of sound? Interpreting these words accurately allows these musical descriptions of sound to be related to scientific descriptions of sound. But do musicians, scientists, instrument makers, and others mean the same things by the same words? When these groups converse about qualities of sound, they often use an expansive lexicon of terms (bright, brassy, dark, pointed, muddy, etc.). It may be inaccurate to assume that the same terms and phrases have the same meaning to these different groups of people or even remain self-consistent for a single individual. To investigate the use of words and phrases in this lexicon, subjects with varying musical and scientific backgrounds were surveyed. The subjects were asked to listen to different pieces of recorded music and asked to use their own colloquial language to describe the musical qualities and differences they perceived in these pieces. In this talk, I describe some qualitative results of this survey and identify some of the more problematic terms used by these various groups to describe sound quality.

The Physics of Music is a lecture and laboratory class which satisfies a quantitative physical science requirement. It is open to students of all majors. Students taking the class may or may not have musical backgrounds, and generally are not majors in the physical sciences. In this laboratory exercise, students record sounds of the bells of the Harris Carillon in the tower of WFU’s Wait Chapel. Using Audacity and other software, students generate frequency spectra of different bells. The prominent presence of minor thirds in the spectrum makes for a useful comparison between spectra of bells and typical concert instruments. In this lab, students identify spectral features of individual bells, find similarities and differences between different bell spectra, and observe the decay of spectral features over time. In this talk, I will describe some of the activities performed by the students in the lab and comment on some of the challenges of performing this laboratory exercise with students of varied musical and scientific backgrounds.

Undergraduate music students have many preconceived notions about tuning and temperament. For most of them, a piano tuned in equal temperament is perfectly “in tune” and A4 = 440 Hz is the only pitch standard that has ever existed. We find these naive conceptions about tuning and temperament to be common among our introductory Physics of Music students--music majors, students pursuing majors in the sciences, and other non-science majors. In this paper we describe how we address some of these issues. We teach the mathematical underpinnings of equal, Pythagorean, just, and meantone temperaments, as well as their musical advantages and disadvantages, through the use of live demonstrations and recorded examples. We also describe our future plans to use recorded examples and available local resources—including reproductions of Baroque woodwinds tuned to A4 = 415 Hz and a 1799 organ at A4 = 409 Hz—to give students a broader understanding of historical and modern pitch standards.