Overview

After studying the nature of musical sounds and their propagation, we are now going to focus on the sources of these sounds: music instruments. Composers, musicians and scientists have always been interested in understanding the production mode of musical sounds. Jean-Philippe Rameau used to say for example that 'the mere resonance of the sonorous body accounts for all of music theory and practice' [RAM 37]. Numerous mathematicians and physicists have brought their contributions [FIC 96]. However, we are far from having complete models at our disposal to describe music instruments exactly. The way they function can be extremely complex, and require the use of very sophisticated theories. Turbulence theory is needed, for example, to describe the oscillations of the flow of air produced at the mouthpiece of a flute or an organ pipe [INS 95, FLE 98].

Simply put, a music instrument is made of two essential parts: the vibrator (the source of the vibrations) and the resonator. A string by itself hardly produces any sound. It needs to be combined with a resonator to more efficiently transform the vibration's mechanical energy into acoustic energy. This may have been discovered in prehistoric times when people used their mouths when pulling the string on a bow: 10,000 to 15,000 year old cave art found in the Trois-Fr res cave, in Ari ge, France, shows a sorcerer holding the upper part of a bow between his teeth, the lower part in his left hand, and playing the string with his...