The Audio Expert, 2nd Edition

Chapter 26

Musical Instruments

This section explains the mechanics of musical instruments and how they create sound. It’s impossible to cover every instrument here, but I’ll describe the more popular types. Besides the construction and acoustic theory of how musical instruments work, their sound also depends greatly on how they’re played; there’s an intimate relationship between the instrument and the performer. For bowed instruments such as violins and cellos, their tone quality, or timbre, is affected by where on the string the bow is placed, how hard it’s pressed against the string, and how quickly it’s drawn across the string. These three bow parameters vary the timbre through its entire range of possibilities. Here, timbre describes the ...