Lord Rayleigh's contributions to musical acoustics

Abstract

Rayleigh's work touched virtually every area of acoustics in some way; musical acoustics is certainly no exception. Besides laying the groundwork for all subsequent research on musical instruments with his informative discussions of the vibrations of strings, bars, membranes, plates, air columns, and resonators, he did important theoretical and experimental work on bells and kettledrums. He identified the vibrational modes that radiated the most prominent partials in the sounds of both these instruments, and he recognized that the nominal pitch of a church bell lies one octave below the fifth partial. In the area of music perception, his most important contributions were his studies of absolute pitch and sound source localization.