This post is about a book I stumbled upon while cleaning my room: Physics and Music by Gleb Anfilov, translated from the Russian by Boris Kuznetsov, now also available online for free.
Mir Publishers issued the book in 1966, and that was part of what intrigued me - what was known about the topic in that era? How much of it has stood the test of time? How much of it has been lost from the subject, in more recent books? These questions still remain to be answered but here are some of the interesting things I found along the way:
Membranes
The book declares drums to be the oldest musical instruments, but does not say much about them, except briefly to indicate that they have no musical pitch and simply produce noise. I suspect this is due to the book limiting itself largely to Western music. There are drums with musical pitch in other musical traditions (e.g. Indian and Latin American).
Wind
The book declares that the simplest musical instrument is the conductor's baton - an abstract but pleasing identification. Then it launches into the description of what it calls the next simplest instrument - the flute.
A long chapter traces the development of the flute and its variations such as the horn, oboe, clarinet (apparently the mouthpieces of older clarinets are missing since they used to be buried with the player), and saxophone (developed by the Belgian Adolphe Sax). Finally it comes to the biggest instrument of all - the organ (the black and white keys of the piano first appeared on the organ).
Strings
String instruments are tackled next, starting with the harp, followed by the lute, mandolin and guitar. Finally we arrive at the violin, with a large section on Stradivarius and the efforts of scientists to uncover the secrets which enabled him to make amazing instruments (progress along this direction had been partial until 1966 at least; there did not seem to be a manufacturing formula since every instrument seemed to be unique; the verdict is that the Stradivarius violins were amazing not due to their individual parts but due to how they were combined).
Then the discussion moves to the monochord, followed by the clavichord and harpsichord (mentioning that Mozart wrote his Rondo alla Turca for it), finally landing largely on the piano.
Physics
The next part of the book launches into a description of the physics of music, though in a way accessible to nonscientists. I found the physicist's definition of a musical instrument interesting - a vibrator (e.g. a clamped string) plus a resonator (e.g. a shell). Sometimes the resonator also vibrates: the French horn's sound is apparently a combination of the vibrations of its air column and its metal.
There is an interesting discussion of how Helmholtz was the first to 'take music apart' into its constituent sounds by using various resonators to detect the notes being produced by any instrument. He could, in a reverse of this process, 'assemble' sounds - e.g. with a combination of tuning forks he could recreate the vowels of human speech.
Voice
The chapter on human voice and hearing, going by the definition presented above, says that the human voice is also a musical instrument. Naively speaking, its vibrators are elastic tendons and its resonators are the cavities of the throat and the mouth. In practice, the tendons can also be vibrated by electric signals from the brain.
In fact when a singer listens to music without singing, the vocal chords follow along. This can be used to test a person's ear for music: play her a note and detect if the chords follow; it can also be used to identify voices as baritone, tenor, etc.
The book also discusses which voices carry the furthest (an important consideration before microphones and amplification were available), and how the ear perceives and even adds its own frequencies to the sound.
Electronic Music
This was already a big topic when book was published. The chapter has an interesting historical tidbit about Theremin demonstrating his instrument before Lenin (Lenin apparently stepped in and finished the piece himself after Theremin showed him the technique).
An interesting fact I learnt was that instruments are identified by the beginning, or attack, of a note they produce. That is, if we erase its beginning, it can be hard to say whether the note comes from a flute or a piano. This is one reason why electronic sound finds it difficult to replicate real instruments - maybe a problem for AI?
Postscript
The book ends with an account of computer-generated music. I won't go into all the details, except to share from the book that already in the 18th century people were generating music by throwing dice and reading phrases off precomposed tables (written by Mozart, e.g.). This is one sort of idea to start with in computer music - randomly combining phrases which nonetheless contain some musical order.
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