Related papers: The Physicist's Guide to the Orchestra
Currently, string theory represents the only advanced approach to a unification of all interactions, including gravity. In spite of the more than thirty years of its existence it did not make any empirically testable predictions. And it is…
We review recent research on the transport properties of classical waves through chaotic systems with special emphasis on microwaves and sound waves. Inasmuch as these experiments use antennas or transducers to couple waves into or out of…
A lock-in amplifier is a versatile instrument frequently used in physics research. However, many students struggle with the basic operating principles of a lock-in amplifier which can lead to a variety of difficulties. To improve students'…
This chapter introduces the fundamental principles of gravitational wave detectors in a simple and comprehensive manner. Because these instruments aim for extremely high sensitivity, it is essential to understand their various noise…
Up to around 1.1 kHz, the soundboard of the piano behaves like a homogeneous plate whereas upper in frequency, it can be described as a set of waveguides defined by the ribs. In consequence: a) The acoustical coincidence phenomenon is…
Educators must make decisions about learner expectations and skills on which to focus when it comes to laboratory activities. There are various approaches but the general pattern is to encourage students to measure ordered pairs, plot a…
Popular music is a key cultural expression that has captured listeners' attention for ages. Many of the structural regularities underlying musical discourse are yet to be discovered and, accordingly, their historical evolution remains…
Similar to colorization in computer vision, instrument separation is to assign instrument labels (e.g. piano, guitar...) to notes from unlabeled mixtures which contain only performance information. To address the problem, we adopt diffusion…
The tone hole geometry of a clarinet is optimized numerically. The instrument is modeled as a network of one dimensional transmission line elements. For each (non-fork) fingering, we first calculate the resonance frequencies of the input…
Categorization is crucial for content description in archiving of music signals. On many occasions, human brain fails to classify the instruments properly just by listening to their sounds which is evident from the human response data…
The spring-mass system studied in undergraduate physics laboratories may show complex dynamics due to the simultaneous action of gravitational, elastic, and torsional forces, in addition to air friction. In this paper, we describe a…
Photogates are probably the most commonly used electronic instruments to aid experiments in the field of mechanics. Although they are offered by many manufacturers, they can be too expensive to be widely used in all classrooms, in multiple…
When playing the clarinet, opening the register hole allows for a transition from the first to the second register, producing a twelfth interval. On an artificial player system, the blowing pressure range where the second register remains…
Within a Music Information Retrieval perspective, the goal of the study presented here is to investigate the impact on sound features of the musician's affective intention, namely when trying to intentionally convey emotional contents via…
This paper addresses the question as to whether the methodology followed in building and assessing string theory can be considered scientific in the same sense, say, that the methodology followed in building and assessing the Standard Model…
There is a class of physical filtration processes where the input is adequately modeled by a continuous periodic function f (x) of bounded variation over its period, and the output depends only on certain harmonics of the Fourier expansion…
Thermodynamic parameters such as temperature and pressure can be defined from the statistical behavior of a system. Therefore, thermal fluctuation is an inseparable characteristic of these parameters which eventually finds its way into…
The noise of a device under test (DUT) is measured simultaneously with two instruments, each of which contributes its own background. The average cross power spectral density converges to the DUT power spectral density. This method enables…
The periodically driven harmonic oscillator with damping is one of the most elementary and trusted models in physics and normally applied in its steady state, disregarding specific initial conditions and associated transients. For example,…
We propose a data-driven approach to music instrument practice that allows studying patterns and long-term trends through visualization. Inspired by life logging and fitness tracking, we imagine musicians to record their practice sessions…