Klarinet Archive - Posting 000584.txt from 2004/03

From: "Fred Wilson" <fred.wilson@------.edu>
Subj: Re: [kl] Haydn and sound waves
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 12:04:25 -0500

Good thought but bad physics. All instruments produce highly complext wave
forms, and none look like simple sine waves - - although they are periodic.
Each cycle will have an "attack" portion (highly complex, including rise
time, and other factors), the body of the pulse, and a "decay" side as time
increases. Timbre is produced by the superposition of many independent
periodic functions (and for any instruments I have ever looked at, none of
these are simple sine waves). The clarinet's beauty comes from the absense
of certain of these "overtones." Cliping the ampltude of a periodic function
might produce a horrible sound (for example, a square wave generator
produces a truly noisy mess), but perchance it might not. Our lives are
richer because people have, through trial and error, modified the complex
wave forms produced till they reached the one that simply put, sings.

Fred Wilson
Prof. Physics
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ormondtoby Montoya" <ormondtoby@------.net>
To: <klarinet@------.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 2004 9:20 AM
Subject: [kl] Haydn and sound waves

> This morning I was listening to a Haydn composition that emphasized the
> timbres of each instrument and created a 'dialogue' that went far beyond
> the normal mechanism of counterpoint melodies 'answering' each other.
> It was on NPR, I wish I could remember the title.
>
> For some reason, an image of sine waves popped into my mind, and I
> thought to myself:
>
> "If we clipped away the 'tops' and 'bottoms' of each cycle in these
> sound waves, we would not have the music, would we? And our emotional
> lives would be much poorer, wouldn't they?"
>
>
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