Acoustics Of Musical Instruments Research Articles

Special Issue on Mechanics, Dynamics and Acoustics of Musical Instruments

The mechanics, dynamics and acoustics of musical instruments concern scientists from different fields, such as physics, mechanics, acoustics, psychology, and music, as well as musical instrument manufacturers, who use these factors to not only understand and explain the phenomena that take place inside and outside of musical instruments as a result of the propagation of sounds, but also those related to the perception of the sounds produced by them [...]

"ACOUSTIC AND ELASTIC PROPERTIES OF WOOD FOR VIOLIN SOUND POST "

The sound post is a very important element in the acoustics of musical instruments with strings and bows. This paper presents the experimental investigations regarding the elastic and acoustic properties of the wood used to obtain the sound post. The speed of propagation of sound waves in wood and then the determination of the elastic properties in the longitudinal direction was measured on a number of 12 sound posts made from new and old resonance wood. It was found that the elastic and acoustic properties depend on the degree of aging of the wood. Thus, the longitudinal propagation speed is about 4% higher in samples of freshly processed wood compared to those of aged wood; the longitudinal modulus of elasticity is about 19% lower for aged wood samples.

Graduate education in acoustics at a distance from Penn State

The Graduate Program in Acoustics at Penn State has been providing access to graduate level education in Acoustics for remote students across the country and around the world for more than 35 years. This poster summarizes the distance education Acoustics program from Penn State by showcasing student demographics, capstone paper topics, enrollment statistics and trends, and the success of our graduates. Our distance education program is offered in conjunction with our resident graduate program—course lectures are broadcast as a live stream over Zoom from a hybrid multimedia classroom allowing remote students to engage with faculty and students during live lectures; archived recordings are available for offline viewing afterward. Courses offered for distance education students include: fundamentals of acoustics and vibration, electroacoustic transducers, signal processing, acoustics in fluid media, sound and structure interaction, digital signal processing, aerodynamic noise, acoustic measurements and data analysis, ocean acoustics, architectural acoustics, noise control engineering, nonlinear acoustics, outdoor sound propagation, computational acoustics, flow induced noise, spatial sound and 3D audio, marine bioacoustics, and acoustics of musical instruments. Distance Education students can earn the M.Eng. in Acoustics degree remotely by completing 30 credits of coursework and writing a capstone paper.

The graduate program in acoustics at Penn State

The Graduate Program in Acoustics at Penn State offers graduate degrees (M.Eng., M.S., Ph.D.) in Acoustics, with courses and research opportunities in a wide variety of subfields. Our 820 alumni are employed around the world in a wide variety of military and government labs, academic institutions, consulting firms, and consumer audio and related industries. Our 40+ faculty from several disciplines conduct research and teach courses in structural acoustics, nonlinear acoustics, architectural acoustics, signal processing, aeroacoustics, biomedical ultrasound, transducers, computational acoustics, noise and vibration control, acoustic metamaterials, psychoacoustics, and underwater acoustics. Course offerings include fundamentals of acoustics and vibration, electroacoustic transducers, signal processing, acoustics in fluid media, sound and structure interaction, digital signal processing, experimental techniques, acoustic measurements and data analysis, ocean acoustics, architectural acoustics, noise control engineering, nonlinear acoustics, outdoor sound propagation, computational acoustics, biomedical ultrasound, flow induced noise, spatial sound and three-dimensional audio, and the acoustics of musical instruments. This poster highlights faculty research areas, laboratory facilities, student demographics, successful graduates, and recent enrollment and employment trends for the Graduate Program in Acoustics at Penn State.

Teaching a graduate course on the acoustics of musical instruments over Zoom from my house during COVID-19

During Spring 2021, I taught a graduate course, Acoustics of Musical Instruments, to a blended enrollment of resident and distance students. Course content focused on wind (woodwind and brass) and stringed instruments with heavy reference to published literature. This was my third time teaching this course, but the first time teaching it entirely over Zoom from my house with all students also participating only on Zoom. It was also the first time teaching without access to laboratory equipment that would have allowed for interactive classroom demonstrations and out-of-class student projects. Although several students were accomplished musicians and had access multiple musical instruments in their homes, very few students had any access to test equipment that would have allowed for meaningful measurements or experimental projects. To offset this lack of access, I purchased several musical instruments for demonstrations and simple experiments that I could perform from my house and shifted the emphasis for student deliverables to written literature review summaries of published papers. This presentation will describe simple hands-on activities students carried out, demonstrations I was able to perform from my house with limited data analysis capabilities, and the benefits of having graduate students do literature reviews.

In search of the elusive perfect textbook

During my 24-year teaching career so far, besides teaching undergraduate service courses from standard textbooks, I have also taught a variety of advanced courses in acoustics, both at undergraduate and graduate levels. Some courses were well suited to a single textbook, especially when a well-written textbook existed matching course topics. Other times, it was difficult to find a single book covering all course topics at an appropriate level. Sometimes, the “best fit” book was no longer in print, and available alternatives were unsatisfactory for various reasons. For a few courses, I changed books every semester several times before finally finding something that worked. In this talk, I will discuss my experiences selecting, evaluating, and adopting textbooks for courses which I either developed myself (physics of waves, noise control engineering, acoustics of musical instruments) or for which I inherited an established syllabus from another faculty member (fundamentals of acoustics, theoretical acoustics, classical mechanics). I will discuss selection criteria I used to evaluate textbooks, including topical coverage, difficulty level, readability, homework problems, reviews, reputation, and price. I will also discuss what I did when I could not find a satisfactory textbook.

A master’s degree in acoustics through distance education from Penn State

The Graduate Program in Acoustics at Penn State provides online access to graduate level courses leading to the M.Eng. degree in Acoustics. Lectures are broadcast live via Adobe Connect to students scattered around the world, while archived recordings allow working students to access lectures at their convenience. Students earn the M.Eng. in Acoustics degree by completing 30 credits of coursework (six required courses and four electives) and writing a capstone paper. Since 1987, more than 150 distance education students have completed the M.Eng. in Acoustics degree. Many other students take individual courses as non-degree students. Courses offered online include: elements of acoustics and vibration, elements of waves in fluids, electroacoustic transducers, signal processing, acoustics in fluid media, sound and structure interaction, digital signal processing, aerodynamic noise, acoustic measurements and data analysis, ocean acoustics, architectural acoustics, noise control engineering, nonlinear acoustics, outdoor sound propagation, computational acoustics, biomedical ultrasound, flow induced noise, spatial sound and 3D audio, acoustics of musical instruments. This poster describes the distance education experience leading to the M.Eng. degree in Acoustics from Penn State and showcases student demographics, capstone paper topics, enrollment statistics and trends, and the success of our graduates.

Pursuing graduate degrees in acoustics at Penn State

The Graduate Program in Acoustics at Penn State is the only program in the U.S. offering the Ph.D. in Acoustics as well as M.S. and M.Eng. degrees in Acoustics. An interdisciplinary program with faculty from a variety of academic disciplines, the Graduate Program in Acoustics is administratively aligned with the College of Engineering and closely affiliates with the Applied Research Laboratory. Research areas include: structural acoustics, nonlinear acoustics, architectural acoustics, signal processing, aeroacoustics, biomedical ultrasound, transducers, computational acoustics, noise and vibration control, psychoacoustics, and underwater acoustics. Course offerings include fundamentals of acoustics and vibration, electroacoustic transducers, signal processing, acoustics in fluid media, sound and structure interaction, digital signal processing, experimental techniques, acoustic measurements and data analysis, ocean acoustics, architectural acoustics, noise control engineering, nonlinear acoustics, outdoor sound propagation, computational acoustics, biomedical ultrasound, flow induced noise, spatial sound and three-dimensional audio, acoustics of musical instruments. More than 700 Penn State Acoustics graduates serve widely throughout military and government labs, academic institutions, consulting firms and industry. This poster describes faculty research areas, laboratory facilities, student demographics, successful graduates, and recent enrollment and employment trends.

Andrzej Rakowski, 1931–2018

Our community has lost a truly exceptional man and scholar who combined the scientific worlds of acoustics, psychology, and music in a unique way during his career that spanned over half a century. Andrzej Rakowski, Emeritus Professor at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music passed away on April 3, 2018 in Warsaw, Poland, at the age of 87. He was an internationally acclaimed authority on musical acoustics and psychoacoustics and a major figure in auditory perception research. He was born in Warsaw on June 16, 1931. After graduating in electronic engineering (Warsaw University of Technology, M. Sc. in 1957) and music theory (State Higher School of Music in Warsaw, M. A. in 1958), he went to Great Britain on a British Council Scholarship (1958/59) and worked at Durham University, King's College, Newcastle upon Tyne with one of the most renowned specialists on acoustics of musical instruments, Professor E. G. Richardson. Later, after defending his doctoral dissertation (Warsaw University of Technology, D. Sc. in 1963, thesis: “Initial transients in sounds of wind instruments”) he was nominated to the position of Assistant Professor at the newly opened Department of Sound Engineering in Warsaw Higher School of Music (since 2008, Fryderyk Chopin Music University). His research interest turned in the direction of music psychoacoustics and he focused on the issues concerning the perception of pitch. He received a second doctoral degree ( habilitation ) in art sciences (musicology) from the University of Warsaw in 1977 (thesis: “Categorical perception of pitch in music”) and became an associate professor (1982) and then a full-professor (1989), as conferred by the President …

The Graduate Program in Acoustics at the Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate Program in Acoustics at Penn State is the only program in the U.S. offering the Ph.D. degree in acoustics as well as M.S. and M.Eng. degrees in acoustics. An interdisciplinary program with faculty from a variety of academic disciplines, the Graduate Program in Acoustics is administratively aligned with the College of Engineering and closely affiliates with the Applied Research Laboratory. Research areas include structural acoustics, nonlinear acoustics, architectural acoustics, signal processing, aeroacoustics, biomedical ultrasound, transducers, computational acoustics, noise and vibration control, psychoacoustics, and underwater acoustics. Course offerings include fundamentals of acoustics and vibration, electroacoustic transducers, signal processing, acoustics in fluid media, sound and structure interaction, digital signal processing, experimental techniques, acoustic measurements and data analysis, ocean acoustics, architectural acoustics, noise control engineering, nonlinear acoustics, outdoor sound propagation, computational acoustics, flow induced noise, spatial sound and 3D audio, marine bioacoustics, and acoustics of musical instruments. Penn State Acoustics graduates serve widely throughout military and government labs, academic institutions, consulting firms and industry. This poster describes faculty research areas, laboratory facilities, student demographics, successful graduates, and recent enrollment and employment trends.

Things I learned while teaching a graduate level course on the acoustics of musical instruments

In spring 2013, I taught a graduate level course on the acoustics of musical instruments. A prerequisite of two courses on the fundamentals of acoustics and vibration allowed us to explore details and mathematical complexities. Due to time constraints and the decision to delve deep into details rather than provide a broad overview, the course focused on wind and stringed instruments. Both types of instruments were explored through the generator-resonator-radiator paradigm. We discussed nonlinear generators for winds (lip reed, mechanical reed, and air-reed) and realistic initial conditions for strings (finger plucked, struck by a nonlinear hammer, and the stick-slip bowing action); realistic resonators for winds (input impedance and the effects of holes, horns, and viscous losses) and strings (realistic boundary conditions and coupled motion); and radiation (bells and soundboards). This paper will describe some of the Mathematica animations used to illustrate the effect of tone holes on the input impedance of a woodwind instrument, the effect of mouthpiece volume on the input impedance of brass instruments, and the motion of plucked, struck, and bowed strings. We will discuss the challenges of teaching a graduate level course, and what I would do differently the next time I teach it.

The Graduate Program in Acoustics at The Pennsylvania State University

In 2015, the Graduate Program in Acoustics at Penn State will be celebrating 50 years as the only program in the United States offering the Ph.D. in Acoustics as well as M.S. and M.Eng. degrees in Acoustics. An interdisciplinary program with faculty from a variety of academic disciplines, the Acoustics Program is administratively aligned with the College of Engineering and closely affiliated with the Applied Research Laboratory. The research areas include: ocean acoustics, structural acoustics, signal processing, aeroacoustics, thermoacoustics, architectural acoustics, transducers, computational acoustics, nonlinear acoustics, marine bioacoustics, noise and vibration control, and psychoacoustics. The course offerings include fundamentals of acoustics and vibration, electroacoustic transducers, signal processing, acoustics in fluid media, sound-structure interaction, digital signal processing, experimental techniques, acoustic measurements and data analysis, ocean acoustics, architectural acoustics, noise control engineering, nonlinear acoustics, ultrasonic NDE, outdoor sound propagation, computational acoustics, flow induced noise, spatial sound and 3D audio, marine bioacoustics, and the acoustics of musical instruments. Penn State Acoustics graduates serve widely throughout military and government labs, academic institutions, consulting firms, and industry. This poster will summarize faculty, research areas, facilities, student demographics, successful graduates, and recent enrollment and employment trends.

Pursuing the M.Eng. in acoustics through distance education from Penn State

Since 1987, the Graduate Program in Acoustics at Penn State has been providing remote access to graduate level education leading to the M.Eng. degree in Acoustics. Course lecture content is currently broadcast as a live-stream via Adobe Connect to distance students scattered throughout North America and around the world, while archived recordings allow distance students to access lecture material at their convenience. Distance Education students earn the M.Eng. in Acoustics degree by completing 30 credits of coursework (six required core courses and four electives) and writing a capstone paper. Courses offered for distance education students include: fundamentals of acoustics and vibration, electroacoustic transducers, signal processing, acoustics in fluid media, sound and structure interaction, digital signal processing, aerodynamic noise, acoustic measurements and data analysis, ocean acoustics, architectural acoustics, noise control engineering, nonlinear acoustics, outdoor sound propagation, computational acoustics, flow induced noise, spatial sound and 3D audio, marine bioacoustics, and acoustics of musical instruments. This poster will summarize the distance education experience leading to the M.Eng. degree in Acoustics from Penn State showcasing student demographics, capstone paper topics, enrollment statistics and trends, and the success of our graduates.

Towards the state of the art in virtual acoustics technology

Active acoustics enhancement systems have been applied in room acoustics for decades yet it would be hard to say that their ultimate performance has been achieved, even with the power of today’s fast digital processors. There are many challenges ahead including the creation of homogeneous directionless diffuse field using a limited number of discrete loudspeaker sources. There is also a need to create soundfield having some localized directional properties mimicking the phenomena found in acoustics of musical instruments interfacing the acoustics of rooms. Some solutions to these challenges will be presented and discussed by the authors.

Dedication to Johan E. F. Sundberg.

Johan Sundberg: Eminent pioneer in voice sciences, longstanding scientist at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology with a personal Chair in Musical Acoustics; author of the seminal book The Science of the Voice and over 200 articles on singing; mentor and role model to dozens of students; sought after speaker; honored for scholarship, leadership, and inspirational passion for ideas. We dedicate to him this special double issue (Volume 21, No. 1 & No. 2) of Psychomusicology: Music, Mind & Brain entitled Singing and Psychomusicology. Johan Sundberg was born in 1936 in Sweden. A lifelong fascination with music acoustics emerged in his youth. Creative, curiosity-driven and interested in music and mathematics, he built a small pipe organ before the end of high school. His focus eventually changed from pipes of the organ to those of the singing voice. He obtained his university education at Uppsala University, one of the most influential universities in Scandinavia (and the oldest, founded in 1477) where he studied philosophy, aesthetics, math and musicology. In 1966, he received a doctoral degree in musicology on the acoustics of organ flue pipes. He also studied organ and liturgical music, leading to a cantor's degree. For over 20 years he sang in the Stockholm (Adolf Fredrik's) Bach Choir, and he served as its president for more than half of that time. He studied voice with the renowned Dagmar Gustafson between 1963 to 1988 and presented his one and only public solo concert on his 50th birthday. BEGINNINGS: KTH ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY When writing his Ph.D. thesis on organ pipes, for Uppsala University, Johan Sundberg was in need of expert guidance in acoustical engineering and measurements. He made his way to the Speech Transmission Laboratory at Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan (KTH) in Stockholm, then headed by the great pioneer in speech communication, Gunnar Fant. (KTH in Sweden might be compared to MIT in the United States; it is at the same time responsible for one-third of Sweden's capacity for engineering studies and technical research at the post-secondary level). There Johan found Frasse Fransson, co-inventor with Erik Jansson of the Ionophone. Frasse, a retired engineer and a passionate flute player, had been welcomed by Gunnar Fant to pursue his interest in the acoustics of musical instruments at the KTH lab; and now he introduced Johan to the physics of music. Gunnar Fant saw Johan's special interests in the acoustics of singing and his application of the source-filter theory as a valuable contribution to the lab's activities. Indeed, much of Johan's work was highly relevant to speech, such as the APEX project on articulatory models with Bjorn Lindblom, that is still being developed today. Gunnar Fant soon recognized Sundberg's significance and potential in music acoustics, and in 1968 he encouraged Johan to develop a research group of his own. Johan began then to publish on his discoveries related to the singer's formant. Over the next decade he also published a textbook on musical acoustics that was later translated into English (Sundberg, 1991). In 1973 he initiated an annual series of intensive day-long seminars on music acoustics open to the Swedish public and leading to a series of nine edited volumes. This series is now available on-line (http://www.speech.kth.se/ music/publications/kma/), thanks to the initiative of Anders Friberg and Johan's other colleagues in the KTH Music Acoustics Group, who produced the collection in honor of Johan's 70th birthday in 2006. Sten Ternstrom, who followed Johan Sundberg as Head of the KTH Music Acoustics Group, said in the foreword to the collection: Johan Sundberg's contributions to science are extensive and profound. With hundreds of articles, books and prizes to his credit, he has long been recognised as a world authority on voice science and music acoustics. Significantly, his devotion to his discipline is coupled with a deep and generous commitment to its wide dissemination, not only among peers, but also to the interested public. …

Gabriel Weinreich: The life and style

Gabriel Weinreich (Gabi) was born in Vilna, Poland (now the capitol of Lithuania) one year prior to the founding of the Acoustical Society of America. When the second world war began in central Europe, Gabi’s family came, in serial fashion, to New York City—Gabi himself arriving in 1941. Gabi studied physics at Columbia, and received a Ph.D. in 1953 for a thesis on atomic physics directed by the legendary I. I. Rabi. He subsequently worked on fundamental properties of semiconductors, first at Bell Labs, then, starting in 1960, at the University of Michigan. In 1977 he turned his attention to the acoustics of musical instruments, mainly the piano and bowed strings. He studied all phases of the physical elements: string excitation, string vibration, coupling, and radiation. Gabi brought his special style to acoustics—a combination of theory and experiment that imaginatively imports ideas and techniques from one area of physics into another, a willingness to attack traditional problems afresh by returning to first principles, and the ability to present ideas with incisive wit and charm so that information is not only informative but is also entertaining.

Music・musicology and acoustics of musical instruments

Music・musicology and acoustics of musical instruments

Acoustics, Audio, and Music Technology Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Several courses combine to form an unofficial but nevertheless effective undergraduate and early graduate music technology program at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Musical Acoustics is taught within the School of Music and includes topics such as resonance behavior of strings and pipes; perception of loudness, pitch, and timbre; and acoustics of musical instruments. Several courses involving computers and music are taught in the School of Music. These courses discuss the fundamentals of computer music, and extensive computer/recording studios provide students with hands-on opportunities to conduct experiments or to produce audio demonstrations or music compositions. The courses differ in terms of the user interfaces, compositional algorithms, and synthesis models employed. There is also a seminar in analysis and synthesis of sounds. In the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, besides conventional digital signal processing, there are several special courses that offer training for a career in music technology. Fundamentals of Engineering Acoustics supplies a rigorous introduction to wave propagation and acoustical systems. Electronic Music Synthesis describes algorithms for music sound synthesis and representation and includes a laboratory component. Topics in Audio Engineering covers psychoacoustics, signal processing, audio coding and recognition, room acoustics, and tranducers.

Teaching musical technology at the University of Edinburgh

The teaching of musical technology at the University of Edinburgh dates from the appointment of John Donaldson as Professor of Music in 1845. One of the courses which he offered was on ‘‘The Structure, Compass and Properties of Musical Instruments,’’ the stated objective being ‘‘to discover the true principles on which musical instruments ought to be constructed, and which may lead, and have led, to the invention of new ones.’’ To this end he created a music classroom well equipped with acoustical apparatus and demonstration instruments. Out of Donaldson’s pioneering work developed a long-standing cooperation between the Faculty of Music and the Department of Natural Philosophy (later Physics and Astronomy) at Edinburgh. Currently two Honors Degree programs with a strong emphasis on musical technology are offered. One is a Bachelor of Music Degree in Music Technology; the other is a Bachelor of Science Degree in Physics with Music. Both programs include courses in introductory musical acoustics, acoustics of musical instruments, analysis and synthesis of sound, and practical music technology. The B.Sc. requires an advanced school qualification in physics and mathematics, but no music; the B.Mus. requires an advanced school music qualification, but less advanced scientific background.

The psychomechanics of real and simulated sound sources

Recent advances in the physical acoustics of musical instruments and the development of physically based signal-processing models have opened a new path to the psychological investigation of sound-source perception. In particular, it is now possible to rigorously and systematically study the perceptual results of changes in physical properties that affect the mechanics of a musical instrument. As a first step in this direction, experiments from several laboratories have been conducted on the recognition and classification of sounds produced by real percussive instruments (bars and plates). These results show a surprising sensitivity to geometric properties. However, this sensitivity depends on the materials composing the sources and on the kinds of judgments listeners have to make. Other experiments have been performed on the perceptual dissimilarities among sounds produced by physical models of bars and plates whose material properties such as density, damping, and elasticity are varied. The results also show a very strong sensitivity of listeners to these latter mechanical dimensions, with the relevant perceptual dimensions often being transformations of the mechanical ones. The scope of the psychoacoustics of sound signals appears to be widening to include what might be called the ‘‘psychomechanics’’ of sound sources.