Introduction

"He who understands nothing but chemistry does not truly understand chemistry either"

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

Music is not purely a form of art. There is a great deal of science that goes behind the production of beautiful musical sounds. In order to understand how music is possible, one must have an understanding of physics. Physics allows us to create musical instruments with different tone qualities and the ability to be played in a certain way to produce a specific pitch or note. Music is sound, and sound is vibrations or waves that are at the right frequency to be perceived by the human ear. Audible vibrations are waves with a frequency between 16 and 20,000 vibrations per second. So what causes sound waves? Sound waves are caused by a disturbance in an elastic medium. These can include the strings on a violin, the reed on a clarinet, and even the human vocal cords. Click on the links below to discover how science makes it possible to create a variety of musical sounds.

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