Dylan Emerson

Robert Gist
PES1000 Sec. OL1
18 December 2020
Physics and Its Effects on Music
Throughout the world, music has been an important contribution to cultures of all kinds.
What started off as simple as cavemen beating mammoth-skin war drums has grown into a
complex expressive art form with thousands of themes. Although music appears simple at first,
with many instruments playing together to create a sound, there are a multitude of underlying
physics elements that are the reasons why music is possible in the first place. We wouldn’t have
the music we have today if it weren’t for physics, and many people don’t understand exactly how
physics plays a role in the things we interact with daily.
What's great about music is all of the different ways it can be expressed, with marching
band being a particular, competitive niche. Marching band is a competitive form of music
performance that involves a band marching around a field in paths to create shapes and provide a
visual element to music. This activity generates a lot of kinetic energy. Each individual has their
own mass, and each individual also carries an instrument that has its own mass. With these
combined masses and applying a velocity as they move around a field, a marching band displays
linear kinetic energy that can be calculated using the formula K=(1/2)mv^2. Something
interesting about this is that two individuals with similar mass and velocity can have drastically
different kinetic energies because of the mass of their instruments, where a tuba can typically
have a mass of 3kg and a flute has a mass as small as 0.1 kg! Therefore, linear kinetic energy can
be applied to music by breaking down the movement of a marching band.
Energy is present in all aspects of music, especially sound energy and elastic energy.
Percussion is an interesting family of instruments in music where the goal is to hit something to
make it resonate. Most people are most familiar with drums, where you can hit the head of a
drum to play it. The moment the drummer hits the head of the drum, the drum is being affected
by elastic energy due to the head deforming as a reaction to being hit, stretching it and storing
potential energy until the head of the drum almost instantaneously bounces back and transfers it's
elastic energy into sound energy. With this in mind, we can manipulate the shape and
components of a drum to get as many different sounds as we wish. For example, a snare drum
has wire-covered silk strings (called snares) that run along the lower head of the drum. When the
top head of the drum is struck and transfers it's elastic energy into sound energy, it vibrates the
lower head, which in turn causes the snares along the lower head to vibrate sympathetically with
it. When this happens, the listener hears a high-pitched, crack-y sound being produced by the
drum. This is just one small example of how important elastic energy and sound energy are in the
realm of music due to the potential energy stored in the elastic energy that gets transferred into
sound energy.
One of the oldest families of instruments is the winds family, where air is blown into the
instrument to produce a sound. What's interesting about this family is how some instruments
utilize Bernoulli's principle to be able to accomplish this effect. Bernoulli’s principle states that
an increase in the speed of a fluid occurs simultaneously with a decrease in pressure or the
fluid’s potential energy. A trumpet, for example, is a small brass instrument with a detachable
mouthpiece. This mouthpiece acts as a constriction for the air that is blown into it by the player,
effectively increasing air speed velocity and decreasing pressure in the constriction. With a few
different tapered and conical cavities in combination with buzzing from the player's lips, this
allows the air to move quicker and vibrate much louder. What a trumpet is essentially doing here
is changing pressure throughout the instrument using different shaped cavities and valves to push
the air through the instrument faster. Therefore, trumpets utilize Bernoulli's principle by utilizing
constriction to manipulate air flow and add volume.
With a multitude of instruments utilizing many different forces to produce a sound, it is
apparent that music is full of all sorts of forces that we manipulate to create our desired sounds,
such as forces due to pressure allowing us to sing. For example, when a singer sings, they are
utilizing forces due to pressure to make their vocal folds vibrate. Air pressure is pushed out from
the lungs that passes through the vocal folds that allows them to vibrate because of the Bernoulli
effect. Essentially, when their lungs expel air, it opens the vocal cords. As this air column
travels, it creates a Bernoulli effect that initiates the closing phase of the vibrations from the
singer's vocal cords. The singer can manipulate this further by adding tension (compression) in
their vocal cords, allowing their singing to sound harsher and more aggressive. The singer can
also change how much pressure is being exerted from their lungs in order to change the pitch of
the note they are singing. Therefore, utilizing forces due to pressure is just one example of how
the forces of nature impact the sounds we can create when we make music.
Music is entirely about sound and how we can combine frequencies to make songs. The
musical note A4, or A above middle C, serves as a tuning standard. This essentially means that
an instrument will have A4 tuned first to 440Hz, then tune the other notes around it, with each
semitone being tuned by calculating A4 (440Hz) and dividing it or multiplying it by 1.0595
depending on if the tuner wants to go down or up a semitone respectively. By simply tuning one
note to 440Hz, the person tuning is able to tune every note correctly because each note has a
unique frequency. Once each note is tuned to be reasonably accurate, a musician can then play
multiple notes at the same time to combine their frequencies. This creates a combination of
frequencies using set intervals that can have different qualities, like major or minor, that can set
the mood of a musical piece. Therefore, by manipulating waveforms and frequencies, we can
create music.
Thermodynamics has a heavy influence on the way instruments sound, particularly on
brass instruments. The first law of thermodynamics dictates that as heat flows from a hot
reservoir to a cold reservoir, it can be used to do work. In the case of music, brass instruments
are notorious for warping out of tune in the cold, so it's not uncommon for musicians to blow
into their instruments to make sure their instruments are in tune and ready to play. If a brass
instrument warps out of tune, this will cause the music being played to lose a lot of its appeal; the
notes aren't hitting the right frequencies and chords start to sound shaky. So, by blowing through
one's instrument, heat is passing from a heat reservoir (the lungs) into a cold reservoir (the cold
instrument), doing mechanical work in the form of pushing cold air out of the instrument and
stretching the metal to the correct shape. Therefore, the laws of thermodynamics are important to
the world of music because it helps musicians keep their instruments in tune.
When it comes to music, percussion is as old as humanity itself. Mass, weight, and
density are the biggest factors to consider when analyzing percussion and how it sounds. For
many drummers, the weight of a stick is the most important factor because of it's effect on the
feel of the stick in the drummer's hand. Typically, weight is affected by the thickness of a stick,
where thicker sticks are heavier, need more energy to play, and produce a bigger sound. For
example, in marching band, the drum-line typically uses much thicker and heavier sticks than a
drummer in a band because they need to be able to project the sound of their drums across an
entire stadium without the help of microphones. These sticks aren't the most comfortable to use
because their thickness and added weight sits heavier and produces more shock. This is how
weight dramatically affects a drumstick's feel and the quality of its sound.
While weight is one of the most important characteristics of a drumstick, density also
plays a significant role in the tone a drum stick produces, as well as its durability and the shock it
produces. Hickory sticks are among the most popular drum sticks to use because they aren't too
dense, but they are dense enough to take a beating without breaking and provide a comfortable
amount of flex. On the other hand, oak sticks are significantly more dense than hickory sticks
and are known for their rigid response, darker tone, and durability. Because of how dense they
are, oak sticks produce a lot of shock that is translated to the wrist and forearm when playing. So,
density is another important factor to consider that affects the quality of a drum stick.
Although music is primarily aural, there are some components of music where visuals
and mirrors are beneficial. Marching bands around the country often use mirrors to practice and
synchronize technique. For example, drumlines will often use mirrors to match stick heights and
sticking to make sure everyone is playing the same thing the same way at the same time. Flat
mirrors are the most beneficial for this because they don't cause any enlarging, reducing, or
inversion and produce a virtual image that provides the most clarity, making it the best mirror to
use for drummers who want to make sure their drumsticks match. A convex mirror could be used
as well, although it wouldn't be as beneficial. While convex mirrors are good about producing a
virtual image that stays upright, convex mirrors often cause the image to be reduced and the
viewer will seem to be looking into a fish-eye lens. This makes it harder to practice technique
and ensure everything is the same as a drumline because stick heights may appear to be different
as drummers are offset from the focal point of the mirror. Concave mirrors would be effectively
useless in practice sessions because they produce an enlarged, inverted, real image. Because the
image is enlarged, it may not be possible for each drummer to be in the reflection to match their
techniques, and being inverted it is impossible to correctly compensate stick heights because the
brain would get confused with the reverse image. Therefore, mirrors are greatly beneficial to
musicians, especially in a marching band setting, but it's important to use flat mirrors over
convex or concave mirrors because flat mirrors provide the most benefit to practicing.
Momentum isn't as common in music as other principles of physics since music doesn't
typically contain any kind of motion. That being said, we can consider the angular momentum of
vibrations and how that relates to the Law of Conservation of Momentum, which can be
analyzed when playing the guitar. When playing the guitar, it is common to use a pick, which the
guitarist gives an initial velocity before strumming the strings. Steel is a common material to
make strings from due to its elasticity, which causes an elastic collision when the guitar pick
strikes the strings with its initial velocity. So, the guitar pick has an initial velocity, which is
transferred to the strings in an elastic collision, causing them to vibrate and exhibit angular
momentum, conserving the total momentum in the system. This is an example of how the Law of
Conservation of Momentum can relate to music, when an object with an initial velocity strikes
another object to create a vibration.
The realm of music leaves room for a lot of innovation. Even within the past two hundred
years, hundreds of instruments have come into existence. With the aid of modern technology,
innovators have developed an instrument that utilizes electromagnetic waves: the theremin. The
way a theremin works is by generating two electromagnetic fields around two antennae; one
antenna controls volume, and the other antenna controls pitch. A theremin works this way
because it is a type of capacitor, but it's not the full capacitor. A capacitor works by utilizing an
alternating current to store an electric charge using two plates. A theremin can be considered one
plate of the capacitor, while the musician's hand becomes the second plate. In combination with
the air, this creates a full capacitor. So, when the player uses their hand to play the instrument,
they are controlling the oscillations of the electrical current that vibrates a speaker to create
sound waves. But, the frequencies generated by the musician's hand and the theremin's antenna
are too high for the human ear to hear, so the theremin utilizes heterodyning to change the
frequencies to something the human ear can hear. This works by having a second current within
the theremin that works in combination with the other frequency generated by the antenna to
change its frequency. Therefore, by manipulating an electromagnetic field and electrical currents,
a musician is able to create sound waves from the theremin without having to directly touch it.
Music is a combination of different energies, forces, vibrations, and frequencies that are
constantly being manipulated to create a sound that is enjoyable to our ears. Physics is not only
beneficial to music, but is largely responsible for every aspect of it. Whether different
frequencies are being utilized in conjunction with one another to produce a chord or an
instrument is taking advantage of Bernoulli’s principle to increase air speed, it’s apparent that
physics is the one of the greatest reasons why music is even possible.