Inharmonicity, nonlinearity and music
Date
2000
Authors
Fletcher, Neville H.
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Australian Institute of Physics
Abstract
Western music is based upon the sounds of instruments
with repeating waveforms and harmonic frequency
spectra. While strings and pipes come close
to this ideal, they achieve it only because of the
influence of great levels of nonlinearity in the sound
generating mechanism. Bells and gongs, on the
other hand, generally have very inharmonic spectra,
and when significant nonlinearity is present it leads
to phenomena such as pitch glide, frequency-multiplication
cascades, and transition to chaos.
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The Physicist
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Journal article
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2037-12-31
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