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?

• Standing waves in columns of air

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?

• Timbre
• A simple interactive waveform synthesizer allows you to modify the shape of a wave and listen to the result.
• Java applet to synthesize wave form and listen to it thanks to PhET and the University of Colorado at Boulder
• Another sound synthesis tool thanks to Paul Faustad
• A mathematical investigation of timbre

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?

• Adding waves of different frequency -- beats

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

• Practice problems from winter sports

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