Main content
Math for fun and glory
Course: Math for fun and glory > Unit 1
Lesson 5: Singing (and noises)What is up with noises? (The science and mathematics of sound, frequency, and pitch)
Accuracy not guaranteed. Get Audacity and play! http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Correction: it is the "Basilar" membrane, which is what I say, but somehow between recording the script and actually drawing the stuff I got confused and thought I just pronounced my Vs poorly. Always sad to have such a simple and glaring error in something I put hundreds of hours of work into, but a "Vasilar" membrane can be the kind that a Vi draws to explain Viola Vibrations, I guess! Making up new words is just so prolightfully awstastic.
Props to my Bro for excellent and creative swing pushing, and to my Mamma for filming it.
Extra special thanks to my generous donators, without whom I would not have been able to create this video. Because of your support, I have the equipment, time, and take-out Thai food necessary for doing stuff like this. Created by Vi Hart.
Want to join the conversation?
- I just don't get why a C sounds different on a violin as opposed to a trumpet. Can someone explain?(26 votes)
- It's also a matter of attack and decay. You can play a note on a trumpet and then play the same note on a flute. If you cut out the beginning (attack) and end (decay) of each note, you will have a hard time telling which was the flute and which the trumpet. But our brains are able to determine a sound by matching what we hear from a vast library of sounds we remember. The overtones as well as the attack and decay characteristics of a tone give us a clue as to what instrument it was.(15 votes)
- AtVi Hart describes how your ears work. What is different about deaf peoples ears that make them perceive sound differently than you or I? Is it the same reason for people that have impaired hearing? 1:21(17 votes)
- Good Question! - Technically no two individuals experience/interpret/perceive "every" sound in exactly the same way.
There are many influences that would contribute or cause deafness and/or hearing impairment in any individual/creature. Humans are not the only living being that experience deafness and hearing impairment and cause them to perceive sounds differently than you or I. There are also varying degrees of deafness or hearing impairment (mild, moderate, severe, profound). Any one, or combination of one or more of the factors below would cause different people to perceive sound(s) differently.
A few factors that can contribute to deafness and/or hearing impairment.
Age, heredity, genetic malformation/birth defects, physical trauma or injury, ruptured/perforated eardrum, impacted ear wax, illness/infections/tumors, some medications, prolonged exposure to high levels of noise/sounds, psychological problems.(9 votes)
- Quick question: At...if you get the chromatic scale at this point... then what are the semitones? I thought the chromatic scale was made from every note within an octave, which includes the accidentals. 5:10
Also, she doesn't have all the notes at this point anyway... I'm confused. Is she talking about some scale that I don't know about?(3 votes)- We call steps smaller than a half step "semitones" there are many places in music around the world, where semitones appear by accident and on purpose. A "Blue Note" is sung as a semitone and played as two adjacent notes.
If you keep dividing the string into smaller and smaller ratios you will very quickly make a frequency that is not a half step. Actually none of these half steps are aligned with Pythagoras' ratios, which I address below.
The intervals of the chromatic scale are harmonic intervals. We use the term "Circle of Fifths" to explain how all of the intervals in chromatic tuning are interrelated. C to G is five steps up, hence a "fifth". The circle goes like this:
C:G:D:A:E:B:Gb(A#):Db(C#):Ab(G#):Eb(D#):Bb(A#):F:C...etc
But this is all with just the one ratio of 3:2. The inaccuracy of what she is saying is that the piano notes (equal temperament) line up with these perfect ratios. The fact is that these notes are close to the ratios but not exact. The piano and everything that uses the "chromatic scale" is tuned to "equal temperament". If you take the frequency of a note and multiply it by the 12th root of 2 (2^(1/12)), you divide each step of the chromatic scale into equal shifts (it's 1.0594630943593 for short). Check any instrument that is perfectly tuned and you will find the shift from A 440 to E is 659.26 which Vi calls 660.
There is another tuning system called Just Intonation (check out the Wikipedia article) where the ratios are perfect like Pythagoras. You can see (and hear) why we don't use this system in the article.
Way over-sharing, I know, but I love trying to understand this stuff and explaining it is the best way to get close.(33 votes)
- Why did she break her viola at? 1:46(8 votes)
- Because she went so tight on the string, that the vibration was so strong it actually had enough kinetic energy to break the string.(10 votes)
- What is the fluid int the Cochlea called?(6 votes)
- Is there a reason the cochlea is shaped in a spiral?(3 votes)
- Yes. The cochlea is spiraled to save space.If the cochlea was a straight, long, tube, it would stick straight into the brain.(8 votes)
- Can sound move anything? What about having two sound waves that cancel each other out...is that possible?(2 votes)
- Sound cannot truly move anything, unless you count vibrations. This is because the troughs basically cancel any movement created during the peaks and any movement created during the troughs will be cancelled by the later peak.
Two sound waves can actually cancel each other out. An example of this is in noise canceling headphones which operate on this very principle. The headphones will play the inverse of the background noise. The two cancel out, and you hear only what the headphones want you to hear.(4 votes)
- is there such thing as an inverse sound wave, and if so, what is it?(3 votes)
- A sound wave's inverse sound wave is the wave of which the oscillation is the negative of the original wave. When the waves are emitted together, they add up to a standstill. A sound wave's inverse can therefore be used to cancel it.(2 votes)
- So if this is how Viola's and pianos work, is this how your voice works?(3 votes)
- So if this is how Viola's and pianos work, is this how your voice works?(3 votes)
Video transcript
[PIANO ARPEGGIOS] When things move, they
tend to hit other things. And then those things move, too. When I pluck this string,
it's shoving back and forth against the air
molecules around it and they push against
other air molecules that they're not literally
hitting so much as getting too close for comfort
until they get to the air molecules in our
ears, which push against some stuff in our ear. And then that sends signals
to our brain to say, Hey, I am getting
pushed around here. Let's experience this as sound. This string is pretty
special, because it likes to vibrate in a certain
way and at a certain speed. When you're putting your
little sister on a swing, you have to get
your timing right. It takes her a certain amount
of time to complete a swing and it's the same
every time, basically. If you time your pushes to
be the same length of time, then even general pushes make
your swing higher and higher. That's amplification. If you try to push
more frequently, you'll just end up pushing her
when she's swinging backwards and instead of going higher,
you'll dampen the vibration. It's the same thing
with this string. It wants to swing at a
certain speed, frequency. If I were to sing
that same pitch, the sound waves I'm singing
will push against the string at the right speed to amplify
the vibrations so that that string vibrates while
the other strings don't. It's called a
sympathy vibration. Here's how our ears work. Firstly, we've got this ear
drum that gets pushed around by the sound waves. And then that pushes
against some ear bones that push against the cochlea,
which has fluid in it. And now it's sending waves of
fluid instead of waves of air. But what follows is the same
concept as the swing thing. The fluid goes down
this long tunnel, which has a membrane called
the basilar membrane. Now, when we have a viola
string, the tighter and stiffer it is, the higher the pitch,
which means a faster frequency. The basilar membrane is stiffer
at the beginning of the tunnel and gradually gets
looser so that it vibrates at high frequencies
at the beginning of the cochlea and goes through the whole
spectrum down to low notes at the other end. So when this fluid starts
getting pushed around at a certain frequency,
such as middle C, there's a certain part of the
ear that vibrates in sympathy. The part that's
vibrating a lot is going to push against
another kind of fluid in the other half
of the cochlea. And this fluid has hairs in
it which get pushed around by the fluid, and then they're
like, Hey, I'm middle C and I'm getting pushed
around quite a bit! Also in humans, at least,
it's not a straight tube. The cochlea is
awesomely spiraled up. OK, that's cool. But here are some questions. You can make the note
C on any instrument. And the ear will
be like, Hey, a C. But that C sounds very
different depending on whether I sing it
or play it on viola. Why? And then there's
some technicalities in the mathematics
of swing pushing. It's not exactly true that
pushing with the same frequency that the swing is
swinging is the only way to get this swing to swing. You could push on just
every other swing. And though the swing
wouldn't go quite as high as if you pushed every time, it
would still swing pretty well. In fact, instead of pushing
every time or half the time, you could push once every three
swings or four, and so on. There's a whole series
of timings that work, though the height of the swing,
the amplitude, gets smaller. So in the cochlea, when
one frequency goes in, shouldn't it be that part
of it vibrates a lot, but there's another part that
likes to vibrate twice as fast, and the waves push
it every other time and make it vibrate, too. And then there's
another part that likes to vibrate three times
as fast and four times. And this whole series is all
sending signals to the brain that we somehow perceive
it as a single note? Would that makes sense? Let's also say we played
the frequency that's twice as fast as this
one at the same time. It would vibrate places
that the first note already vibrated, though
maybe more strongly. This overlap, you'd
think, would make our brains perceive these two
different frequencies as being almost the same, even though
they're very far away. Keep that in mind while
we go back to Pythagoras. You probably know him from
the whole Pythagorean theorem thing, but he's also
famous for doing this. He took a string that
played some note, let's call it C. Then,
since Pythagoras liked simple proportions,
he wanted to see what note the string would play
if you made it 1/2 the length. So he played 1/2
the length and found the note was an octave higher. He thought that was pretty neat. So then he tried the
next simplest ratio and played 1/3 of the string. If the full length
was C, then 1/3 the length would give the note
G, an octave and a fifth above. The next ratio to try
was 1/4 of the string, but we can already figure
out what note that would be. In 1/2 the string was C an
octave up, then 1/2 of that would be C another octave up. And 1/2 of that would be
another octave higher, and so on and so forth. And then 1/5 of the string
would make the note E. But wait. Let's play that again. It's a C Major chord. OK. So what about 1/6? We can figure that one out, too,
using ratios we already know. 1/6 is the same as 1/2 of 1/3. And 1/3 third was this G. So
1/6 is the G an octave up. Check it out. 1/7 will be a new note,
because 7 is prime. And Pythagoras found
that it was this B-flat. Then 8 is 2 times 2 times 2. So 1/8 gives us C
three octaves up. And 1/9 is 1/3 of 1/3. So we go an octave and a fifth
above this octave and a fifth. And the notes get
closer and closer until we have all the notes
in the chromatic scale. And then they go into
semi-tones, et cetera. But let's make one thing clear. This is not some
magic relationship between mathematical ratios
and consonant intervals. It's that these notes
sound good to our ear because our ears
hear them together in every vibration that
reaches the cochlea. Every single note has the
major chord secretly contained within it. So that's why certain intervals
sound consonant and others dissonant and why
tonality is like it is and why cultures that
developed music independently of each other still created
similar scales, chords, and tonality. This is called the overtone
series, by the way. And, because of physics,
but I don't really know why, a string
1/2 the length vibrates twice as
fast, which, hey, makes this series the
same as that series. If this were A440,
meaning that this is a swing that likes to
swing 440 times a second, Here's A an octave up,
twice the frequency 880. And here's E at three times
the original frequency, 1320. The thing about
this series, what with making the string
vibrate with different lengths at different frequencies, is
that the string is actually vibrating in all of
these different ways even when you don't hold
it down and producing all of these frequencies. You don't notice the
higher ones, usually, because the lowest pitch is
loudest and subsumes them. But say I were to
put my finger right in the middle of the string so
that it can't vibrate there, but didn't actually hold
the string down there. Then the string would
be free to vibrate in any way that doesn't
move at that point, while those other
frequencies couldn't vibrate. And if I were to touch
it at the 1/3 point, you'd expect all the
overtones not divisible by 3 to get dampened. And so we'd hear this
and all of its overtones. The cool part is that
the string is pushing it around the air at all these
different frequencies. And so the air is
pushing around your ear at all these
different frequencies. And then the basilar membrane
is vibrating in sympathy with all these frequencies. And your ear puts it
together and understands it as one sound. It says, Hey, we've got some
big vibrations here and pretty strong ones here, and some
here and there and there. And that pattern is
what a viola makes. It's the difference in the
loudness of the overtones that gives the same
note a different timbre. And simple sine wave
with a single frequency with no overtones makes an
ooh sound, like a flute. While reedy nasal
sounding instruments have more power in
the higher overtones. When we make different
vowel sounds, we're using our mouth to
shape the overtones coming from our vocal cords, dampening
some while amplifying others. To demonstrate,
I recorded myself saying ooh, ah, ay, at A440. Now I'm going to put it through
a low-pass filter, which lets through the
frequencies less than A441, but dampens all the overtones. Check it out. [PLAYS BACK THROUGH FILTER] OK. Let's make ourselves
an overtone series. I'm going to have Audacity
create a sine wave, A220. Now I'll make another at
twice the frequency, 440, which is A an octave above. Here it is alone. [PLAYS BACK PITCH] If we play the two
at once, do you think we'll hear the
two separate pitches? Or will our brain say,
Hey, two pure frequencies an octave apart? The higher one must be an
overtone of the lower one. So we're really
hearing one note. Here it is. [PLAYS BACK PITCH] Let's add the next overtime. 3 times 220 gives us 660. Here they are all at once. [PLAYS BACK PITCHES] It sounds like a
different instrument for the fundamental sine
wave but the same pitch. Let's add 880 and now 1000. That sounds wrong. All right. 880 plus 220 is 1100. There, that's better. We can keep going and now we
have all these happy overtones. Zooming in to see the
individual sine waves, I can highlight one
little bump here and see how the first overtone
perfectly fits two bumps. And the next has three,
then four, and so on. By the way, knowing
that the speed of sound is about 340 meters
per second, and seeing that this wave takes about
0.0009 seconds to play, I can multiply those out to find
that the distance between here and here is about 0.3
meters, or one foot. So now all these waves are
shown at actual length. So C-sharp, 1100 is
about a foot long. And each octave down is 1/2 the
frequency or twice the length. That means the lowest
C on a piano, which is five octaves lower than
this C, has a sound wave 1 foot times 2 to the
5, or 32 feet long. OK, now I can play with
the timbre of the sound by changing how loud
the overtones are relative to each other. What your ears are doing right
now is pretty complicated. All these sound waves get added
up together into a single wave. And if I export this file, we
can see what it looks like. Or I suppose you could graph it. Anyway, your speakers
or headphones have this little
diaphragm in them that pushes the air
to make sound waves. To make this shape, it pushes
forward fast here, then does this wiggly thing, and
then another big push forwards. The speak, remember, is
not pushing air from itself to your ears. It bumps against the air,
which bumps against more air, and so on, until some air
bumps into your ear drum, which moves in the same way that the
diaphragm in the speaker did. And that pushes the
little bones that push the cochlea, which pushes
the fluid, which, depending on the stiffness of the
basilar membrane at each point, is either going to push the
basilar membrane in such a way that makes it vibrate a
lot and push the little hairs, or it pushes with
the wrong timing, just like someone
bad at playgrounds. This sound wave will
push in a way that makes the A220 part
of your ear send off a signal, which is
pretty easy to see. Some frequencies get pushed
the wrong direction sometimes, but the pushes in
the right direction more than make up for it. So now all these
different frequencies that we added
together and played are now separated out again. And in the meantime,
many other signals are being sent out
from other noise, like the sound of my voice and
the sound of rain and traffic and noisy neighbors and
air conditioner and so on. But then our brain is
like, Yo, look at these! I found a pattern! And all these frequencies
fit together into a series starting at this pitch. So I will think of
them as one thing. And it is a different thing
than these frequencies, which fit the patterns of Vi's voice. And oh boy, that's a car horn. Somehow this all works. And we're still pretty
far from developing technology that can
listen to lots of sound and separate it out into
things anywhere near as well as our ears
and brains can. Our brains are so good
at finding these patterns that sometimes it finds
them when they're not there, especially if it's
subconsciously looking out for it and you're in
a noisy situation. In fact, if the pattern
is mostly there, your brain will
fill in the blanks and make you hear a tone
that does not exist. Here I've got A220
and his overtones. [PLAYS PITCH] Now I'm going to mute A220. That frequency is
not playing at all. But you hear the pitches
A220 below this A400, even though A440 is the
lowest frequency playing. Your brain is like, Well,
we've got all these overtones, so close enough. Let me mute the highest
overtones one by one. It changes the timbre
but not the pitch, until we leave only one left. Somehow by removing
a higher note, you make the apparent
pitch jump up. And just for good measure. [PLAYS SEQUENCE OF PITCHES] But you should try it yourself. So there you have it. These notes. These notes given to us by
simple ratios of strings, by the laws of physics
and how frequencies vibrate in sympathy
with each other. By the mathematics of
how sine waves add up. These notes are hidden in
every spoken word, tucked away in every song. We hear them in
birdsong, bees buzzing, car horns, crickets,
cries of infants. And most of the time, you don't
even realize they're there. There is a symphony
contained in the screeching of a halting train, if only we
are open to listening to it. Your ears, perfected over
hundreds of millions of years, capture these frequencies
in such exquisite detail that it's a wonder that we
can make sense of it all. But we do. Picking out the patterns
that mathematics dictates. Finding order. Finding beauty.