Additive synthesis is a sound synthesis technique that creates timbre by adding sine waves together.
The harmonic series is the sequence of harmonics, musical tones, or pure tones whose frequency is an integer multiple of a fundamental frequency.
An overtone is any resonant frequency above the fundamental frequency of a sound. In other words, overtones are all pitches higher than the lowest pitch within an individual sound; the fundamental is the lowest pitch. While the fundamental is usually heard most prominently, overtones are actually present in any pitch except a true sine wave. The relative volume or amplitude of various overtone partials is one of the key identifying features of timbre, or the individual characteristic of a sound.
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was a German physicist and physician who made significant contributions in several scientific fields, particularly hydrodynamic stability. The Helmholtz Association, the largest German association of research institutions, is named in his honour.
In music, timbre, also known as tone color or tone quality, is the perceived sound quality of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes different types of sound production, such as choir voices and musical instruments. It also enables listeners to distinguish different instruments in the same category.
Pitch is a perceptual property that allows sounds to be ordered on a frequency-related scale, or more commonly, pitch is the quality that makes it possible to judge sounds as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies. Pitch is a major auditory attribute of musical tones, along with duration, loudness, and timbre.
In music theory, a perfect fifth is the musical interval corresponding to a pair of pitches with a frequency ratio of 3:2, or very nearly so.
In psychoacoustics, a pure tone is a sound with a sinusoidal waveform; that is, a sine wave of constant frequency, phase-shift, and amplitude. By extension, in signal processing a single-frequency tone or pure tone is a purely sinusoidal signal . A pure tone has the property – unique among real-valued wave shapes – that its wave shape is unchanged by linear time-invariant systems; that is, only the phase and amplitude change between such a system's pure-tone input and its output.
Scientific pitch notation (SPN), also known as American standard pitch notation (ASPN) and international pitch notation (IPN), is a method of specifying musical pitch by combining a musical note name and a number identifying the pitch's octave.
Musical acoustics or music acoustics is a multidisciplinary field that combines knowledge from physics, psychophysics, organology, physiology, music theory, ethnomusicology, signal processing and instrument building, among other disciplines. As a branch of acoustics, it is concerned with researching and describing the physics of music – how sounds are employed to make music. Examples of areas of study are the function of musical instruments, the human voice, computer analysis of melody, and in the clinical use of music in music therapy.
Volley theory states that groups of neurons of the auditory system respond to a sound by firing action potentials slightly out of phase with one another so that when combined, a greater frequency of sound can be encoded and sent to the brain to be analyzed. The theory was proposed by Ernest Wever and Charles Bray in 1930 as a supplement to the frequency theory of hearing. It was later discovered that this only occurs in response to sounds that are about 500 Hz to 5000 Hz.
Helmholtz resonance, also known as wind throb, refers to the phenomenon of air resonance in a cavity, an effect named after the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. This type of resonance occurs when air is forced in and out of a cavity, causing the air inside to vibrate at a specific natural frequency. The principle is widely observable in everyday life, notably when blowing across the top of a bottle, resulting in a resonant tone.
The temporal theory of hearing, also called frequency theory or timing theory, states that human perception of sound depends on temporal patterns with which neurons respond to sound in the cochlea. Therefore, in this theory, the pitch of a pure tone is determined by the period of neuron firing patterns—either of single neurons, or groups as described by the volley theory. Temporal theory competes with the place theory of hearing, which instead states that pitch is signaled according to the locations of vibrations along the basilar membrane.
Ohm's acoustic law, sometimes called the acoustic phase law or simply Ohm's law, states that a musical sound is perceived by the ear as a set of a number of constituent pure harmonic tones.
The savart is a unit of measurement for musical pitch intervals. One savart is equal to one thousandth of a decade : 3.9863 cents. Musically, in just intonation, the interval of a decade is precisely a just major twenty-fourth, or, in other words, three octaves and a just major third. Today, musical use of the savart has largely been replaced by the cent and the millioctave. The savart is practically the same as the earlier heptameride (eptameride), one seventh of a meride. One tenth of an heptameride is a decameride and a hundredth of an heptameride is approximately one jot.
In music, the undertone series or subharmonic series is a sequence of notes that results from inverting the intervals of the overtone series. While overtones naturally occur with the physical production of music on instruments, undertones must be produced in unusual ways. While the overtone series is based upon arithmetic multiplication of frequencies, resulting in a harmonic series, the undertone series is based on arithmetic division.
Violin acoustics is an area of study within musical acoustics concerned with how the sound of a violin is created as the result of interactions between its many parts. These acoustic qualities are similar to those of other members of the violin family, such as the viola.
Psychoacoustics is the branch of psychophysics involving the scientific study of the perception of sound by the human auditory system. It is the branch of science studying the psychological responses associated with sound including noise, speech, and music. Psychoacoustics is an interdisciplinary field including psychology, acoustics, electronic engineering, physics, biology, physiology, and computer science.
On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, commonly referred to as Sensations of Tone, is a foundational work on music acoustics and the perception of sound by Hermann von Helmholtz.
Auditory science or hearing science is a field of research and education concerning the perception of sounds by humans, animals, or machines. It is a heavily interdisciplinary field at the crossroad between acoustics, neuroscience, and psychology. It is often related to one or many of these other fields: psychophysics, psychoacoustics, audiology, physiology, otorhinolaryngology, speech science, automatic speech recognition, music psychology, linguistics, and psycholinguistics.
