#Single stringed instrument plus#

The waves represent the vibrational width of a plucked string, and also the corresponding appearance of sound waves.įew musicians realize that you can easily get more harmonics than just an octave. See the chart below for all of the most easily produced harmonics.

#Single stringed instrument plus#

If you create a harmonic at 1/3 of the string length, you will hear the third harmonic – a note that is one octave plus a third higher than the fundamental.Īt ¼ of the string length, you will hear the next octave higher (two octaves higher than the fundamental), the fourth harmonic. (This can require some practice to get the note to sound clearly it should sound like a chiming bell.) The octave note you hear is called the second harmonic, because the first harmonic is the fundamental that you hear when you pluck the open string. You can hear overtones by playing harmonics: if you very lightly touch a string precisely at its midpoint and then pluck it at the same time, you will hear a note one octave higher than when you pluck the open string. Overtones are higher than the fundamental note, and undertones are lower than the fundamental note. The spectrum of sound produced by one plucked string include tones above, below, and within the range of human hearing. The sound wave produced by a single pure tone is called a sine wave, and we can think of it as looking like this, as generated on an oscilloscope:īut we can think of the many tones of an acoustic plucked string as looking more like this: Acoustic instruments produce complex sounds from one plucked string, while single (pure) tones can be produced by certain electronic instruments – which is why they don’t sound as musical as acoustic instruments unless the sounds are “sampled” (recorded from an acoustic instrument rather than originating electronically). In acoustic stringed instruments, a fundamental note rarely occurs alone, even though we are most often not aware that we are hearing more than one note. We will also explore a related phenomenon called “resonant frequency”. The sounds produced when you pluck a string include overtones, undertones, and sympathetic vibrations, which we will explore in this article. But those “unheard” tones often do have a subconscious effect on the listener. Our brain mostly ignores the others and picks up on the fundamental because it is louder.

What we think we hear as a note actually consists of many notes, most of which are significantly less audible than the fundamental one.

What happens when you pluck a taut string, exactly? The obvious answer is that it produces a note, but in fact the result of plucking a string is far more complex.