ABSTRACT
This section explains the mechanics of musical instruments and how they create sound. It’s
impossible to cover every instrument here, but I’ll describe the more popular types. Besides
the construction and acoustic theory of how musical instruments work, their sound also
depends greatly on how they’re played; there’s an intimate relationship between the
instrument and the performer. For bowed instruments such as violins and cellos, their tone
quality, or timbre, is affected by where on the string the bow is placed, how hard it’s
pressed against the string, and how quickly it’s drawn across the string. These three bow
parameters vary the timbre through its entire range of possibilities. Here, timbre describes
the relative volumes of the fundamental pitch and its many harmonic multiples.
