Creative Commons License Copyright © Michael Richmond. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Sound waves, music, and beats

You've seen standing waves on a string, and instruments based on them; but some instruments don't have strings. How do they work?

If a violin plays an "A", and a piano plays an "A", our ears hear two very different sounds. Why? Why don't all musical notes "A" sound the same?

And we will end by asking a question you may have had, ever since we learned about the special cases for adding waves of the same frequency: what happens when waves of DIFFERENT frequency meet?

Want a bit of review before the final exam? Consider some physics based on events at the Winter Olympics.


Creative Commons License Copyright © Michael Richmond. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.