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Unit 1: Acoustics For Musicians

The Physics of Sound:

Sound travels at approximately 343 mph (meters per second) and every sound that you hear is made up of air pressure waves. These 'air pressure waves' in short are vibrations in our surrounding atmosphere. But how do we hear these vibrations in our atmosphere? The easy answer is obviously the use of our ears but there is a lot more to it than just that. Our ears are constructed in a specific way so that we can perceive sound. Every sound starts off as a sound wave which is the compression and rarefaction of particles in the air. They are created obviously by vibrations which causes the air around it to vibrate. These sound waves (vibrations) are collected via the outer ear which is the skin tissue and cartilage on either side of our heads, they are shaped in a special way to channel the vibrations down towards the auditory canal or ear canal for short which is the entrance to your ear. The sound will travel all the way down your ear canal, down to your ear drum where your eardrum will pick the vibrations up. Once they've been collected by the ear drum they are sent through to 3 small bones behind the ear drum and their job is to create waves in the fluids behind the ear drum. These waves are then picked up by the cochlea and the cochlea turns the waves into nerve impulses which travel down the auditory nerve to the brain and this is how we perceive sound.

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Having two ears is beneficial to us as humans as it gives us an awareness of where sound is coming from. If a sound came from the left side of a persons body then the left ear would pick it up. The right ear will also pick it up because although the sound came from the left, sound can be heard in ever direction not just in one. The correct term for this is a sound that travels 'omni-directionally' So the sound will still reach the other ear just at a lower amplitude and with this piece of basic information, our brain will be able to tell us what way the sound is coming from.

Frequency:
Measurements: Every sound wave that we hear in our atmosphere has its own frequency. A frequency is basically the pitch that we hear it in and these frequencies are measured by its wavelength's. Each frequency has its own 'wavelength'. A wavelength is the width between sound waves. The closer the waves are to each other the higher the pitch or frequency will be, vice verse if the waves are far apart from each other then the pitch or frequency will be lower. Also amplitude plays a part in measurements and this is measured by how high the waveforms are. If the waves are tall and high then the amplitude is strong meaning that the sound is loud, alternatively if the sound is quiet, the waves will be small and short. When a sound is made in a large room and the sound can still be heard even after the sound has stopped. We are experiencing 'reverberation' This is the act of sound waves bouncing off walls and gradually losing amplitude every time. We know that high frequencies are much easier to absorb than low frequencies so if a high pitched sound was made in this room, we would stop hearing it faster than what we would if we made a low frequency sound. When using frequencies to categorize different notes in musical terms we can see that the note C has a frequency of approximately 262Hz. With this information we can tell that if we doubled 262Hz we would get 524Hz which is approximately a full octave or 12 full musical notes including sharps (#) Frequency is measured in Hertz or Hz. 1000Hz which is abbreviated to 1khz. Humans can hear anything between 20hz to 20,000hz (20khz)

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Fletcher Munson Curves:

Fletcher Munson Curves are the measurements of sound pressure over certain frequencies. The Fletcher Munson Curves was a way of accurately measuring how well a person could hear a sound at a certain frequency in relation to the volume it was played at. Using the example to the right we can see that the red lines signify 'Equal loudness contours and the blue lines signify the Fletcher Munson curves which were used for comparison.

Sound Envelopes And Characteristics Of Sound:

Envelopes are made up of 4 different actions: Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release. Every sound has its own unique envelope, though some instruments and sounds will share similar layouts for example drums will tend to have a very quick attack (bottom wave form) where as electronic synthesized pads, violins and other orchestral stringed instruments will share a slower attack and longer release. (top wave form)

Attack:
The attack of a sound is how quickly you want the note to hit. A drum would have an extremely quick attack where as a violin or an electronic pad would have a very slow attack as the sound gradually builds up.

Decay:
The decay is how much time in which you want the attack to reach the sustain level which I will explain next.

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Sustain:
The sustain is the main level of the note until it is released. As you can see in the picture on the right, the sustain is held tightly in place before the release kicks in, where as on the second picture there is a gradual decrease in the sustain.

Release:
The release envelope is the time taken for the note to fade back to silence from the main level of the sound (sustain)

Timbre And Complex Wave Forms:

Timbre is basically the physical characteristics of a sound. These characteristics will include things such as the dynamics of the instrument or sound such as the attack, vibrato, pitch and volume etc. Timbre is what makes the sound of different instruments vary. With this knowledge, although both stringed instruments, when you listen out for the different characteristics of the sound you will be able to tell the difference between a harp and a guitar. Complex waveforms are used in synthesizers and usually have multiple different wave forms to be able to produce different sounds. The 4 waveforms that most if not all synthesizers share are of those shown below:

The Sine Wave: The sine wave is the standard plain waveform which gives a smooth, flowing sound and is me as well as many other electronic music producers tend to use this wave form for things such as sub bass.

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The Square Wave: The Square wave tends to give off a robotic electric, tinny sound.

The Triangle Wave: The Triangle wave form is a lot like the sine wave form but with a lot steeper gradients and less of a smooth sound due to the sudden change at the peaks of the wave form.

The Sawtooth Wave: The Sawtooth wave is popular in electronic music due to its gritty, aggressive sounding tone, sawtooth waves are popularly used in things such as hardcore, dubstep and drum n bass.

Psycho-Acoustics: What Is Psycho-Acoustics?

Psycho-Acoustics is the science behind how us as humans perceive sound and how the brain uses and controls sound. One of the many things that PsychoAcoustics studies is the responses we make associated with sound for example forms of music and also speech or talking. A popular theory used to explain Psycho-Acoustics is 'The Cocktail Party Effect'. The Cocktail Party effect shows that when a person is in a room filled with people holding conversations, the brain collects the information that its given and can pin point particular conversations to listen in on. With this information Psycho-Acoustics shows that the brain can control our hearing and focus on particular sounds in the atmosphere we're surrounded in.

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The Doppler Effect:

Another example of Psycho-Acoustics is 'The Doppler Effect' which shows how a sounds frequency changes as the sound moves closer to and further from the listener. Due to The Doppler Effect we can tell that a frequency gets higher on the approach to a listener and as it passes and moves away the frequency gradually becomes lower until we can't hear it. An example of this is the sound of a police, fire engine or ambulance siren. We've all experienced that ear piercing sound when a siren comes flying past you on the street and this just shows exactly how The Doppler Effect works. When the siren is far away the wavelengths are further away from each other from the point where we are standing, once the siren gets closer and closer the sound gets louder and louder and the frequency of the sound also gets higher therefore the siren is only ear piercingly loud and high pitched when it is closest to us because that is when the wavelengths are at their closest.

Sound Pressure and Pain Threshold:

Sound pressure is the force of sound on a surface which in this case would be the ears. Sound pressure is measured in decibels (Db) The threshold of pain for a person is when the noise becomes painful to listen to. Pain threshold varies between different people and their interests. If a person is exposed to loud noises or music regularly then their pain threshold would be a lot stronger than that of somebody who doesn't, age and frequency also plays a part in pain threshold.