Student experiments on acoustics and the physics of music
Ronald D. Edge · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1975
Many universities now offer a course showing the relationship of physics to music and art. Frequently, the laboratory experiments associated with the course are of the pendulum and monochord variety, inherited from the education of physics majors, and this approach does not appeal to music students. To design a series of more stimulating experiments, a two-week workshop, supported by the National Science Foundation, was held in June 1974 at the University of South Carolina. Eighteen participants and five faculty members designed a series of 24 experiments on sound. These covered a great variety of topics at different levels of sophistication. Vibrations in musical instruments such as the guitar, violin, and trumpet were employed, rather than the purely “physical” equipment generally used previously. In addition, simple experiments on sound levels and reverberation times of rooms, noise, and various psychoacoustical experiments were devised, together with more advanced experiments on resonance modes of objects such as violin plates and heavy strings. Several of the experiments have proved very successful when tested in class during the fall semester. A manual of these experiments has been written, and is available to those interested.