ABSTRACT
The science of musical acoustics developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century in tandem with general discoveries in the field of electricity. The scientist Hermann von Helmholtz was a principal player in these discoveries and demonstrated that musical sound could be analyzed according to a few basic physical principles. Using combinations of tuning forks to illustrate his point, he showed that the quality (or timbre) of a tone was reliant on the intensity, order, and number of harmonics (overtones and partials) present in a note. Helmholtz showed that the vibrations found in a single musical tone consisted of a fundamental or base tone accompanied by related harmonics above the frequency of the fundamental. The harmonics of a tone are responsible for creating timbre or tone color. Timbre is what distinguishes the sound of a violin from the sound of a piano, even though both instruments might be playing the same note. Every instrument exhibits its own unique mixture of harmonics called its harmonic spectrum. Figure 7.1 visualizes the natural harmonic series of a tone.
