Question

X. In your own words, explain how the shape of a musical instrument can affect the
sounds it produces.
​

Answer 1

Answer:

Here’s a strange question: how many different kinds of instruments are there?

Well, the western orchestra has up to thirty different types of instruments. But that does not typically include instruments we recognise every day in popular music, or instruments found in other cultures around the world. It does not include ancient music, nor those waiting to be unearthed. And what about instruments yet to be invented, or other objects not thought to be musical instruments but regularly used as such?

A precise answer to this question, then, is probably impossible. It is, at least, limiting. But, the title of this post perhaps holds one solution: how do musical instruments produce sound?

A crash course in sound

The answer to that question is at once highly complex and entirely simple. Instruments, one way or another, make sounds, and all sounds are vibrations which travel across particles that make up the air around us (for humans anyway). These vibrations are then transformed in our eardrum - itself a thin vibrating membrane, like you might find on a drum - to be translated, eventually, into something our brains ‘hear’. Phew, simple!

A musical instrument, in short, might itself vibrate, or have a part that vibrates, or amplifies and/or modifies another vibration. Those vibrations bump into neighbouring air molecules as per my description above, and you can think of those forming a wave like those in the figure below. A faster vibration creates more waves; the rate at which they move is called the ‘frequency’, which we measure in hertz (Hz), or cycles per second. The higher the frequency (or the more ‘bumps’ in the waveform) the higher the pitch.

Music sound wavesCopyrighted image Icon

Sine waves across different frequencies.