The Science of Musical Instruments^ 



By E. G. Richardson, B. A., Ph.D., Sc. 



Reader in Physics, University of Durham, 

 England 



[With 3 plates] 



The past 20 years have seen the development of the electrophonic 

 organ, in which oscillations of electronic origin are transformed into 

 audible sounds having their pitch, loudness, and timbre controlled at 

 the whim of the player. It is not of these that I wish particularly to 

 speak today ; in fact, reading a lecture I gave on the subject in 1940,* 

 I cannot say that there would now be much new to report on these in- 

 struments except in connection with the perfection of the technical 

 details of the tone production. Rather do we now wait upon improve- 

 ments in loudspeakers, especially those which will handle large power 

 without distortion, before the electrophonic organ can replace the pipe 

 organ or the orchestra. 



The apparatus which had to be constructed to synthesize tone elec- 

 tronically for these new musical instruments did, however, serve 

 equally well for the analysis of tone in the old, and even those who do 

 not like electrophonic organs owe a debt to their constructors. The 

 development of electronic analysis in turn directed attention to defects 

 in the conventional instruments and suggested the means of their 

 improvement. 



The basis of such analysis is that a record of the steady wave form 

 of the sounds produced on the musical instrument note by note is made 

 on a disk, magnetic tape, or talkie film, and this record is then played 

 back to a set of electric filters which respond, each to its own proper 

 frequency when this particular frequency is present in the note to be 

 analyzed. The response of each filter may also be made proportional 

 to the loudness of the component in the note to which it responds. In 

 some cases the instrument may be played directly to a microphone 

 connected to a "sound-level recorder" with the aid of which one may 



^ Reprinted by permission from the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, vol. 101, 

 No. 4888, December 12, 1952. 



" Published In the Proceerllngs of the Musical Association, vol. 66, p. 63. 



253 



