JasN00b Posted January 10, 2003 Share Posted January 10, 2003 being more of a musican than a technical type... i hear and think pitches in notes... so could someone tell me what frequencies are what notes and how many frequencies to an octave? i know a low E on a bass guitar is 40hz... but i dont know how much lower say, 16hz is from that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jt1stcav Posted January 10, 2003 Share Posted January 10, 2003 There's a wonderful book out...damn if I can remember the author, but I think it was written either in the last part of the 19th century or very early 20th century. It's call "On the Sensation of Tone" (I'm almost positive). My dad owns a copy, but since moving up to CT with my mom, he took that and all his other books with him when they left me the house! I only play the keyboard/piano/organ by ear and don't have the necessary sheet music training to qualify myself to answer your question correctly, but I think that maybe every third note in an octave has a frequency shift (?)...most likely I'm wrong. I do know from all the years being around pipe organs that in the pedal division of most large church/auditorium pipe organs with a 32' Subbass or Choralbass rank/stop, the lowest C on the pedalboard will play that bass note at about 16 cycles per second. That particular lowest C organ pipe, if it's of an open stop variety, will be roughly 32' in length from its mouth to the top of the pipe, and wide enough for a 6' man to crawl through! It takes a lot of regulated air pressure to blow that note to its fullest extant and produce a loud 16 Hz tone that will fill the entire church/hall with sound that you can both hear and feel! At 16 cycles, you can practically hear every individual beat each second...no other acoustical instrument can produce a bass note quite like a pipe organ (one reason why Mozart penned the phrase "The King of Instruments" to the organ)! I don't know the makeup of bass guitars, but I'd guess that it's low E note, being at 40 Hz, will be about an octave and a half away from a 16 Hz frequency...Hopefully an expert in these matters will set you straight. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prodj101 Posted January 10, 2003 Share Posted January 10, 2003 not sure, man, my new saxophones got here today, I'm thrilled! I got a Keilwerth and a Selmer, but I have to run down to the store cause all they included were cheap crap reeds, so they both sound like crap right now. but, the keiwerth is ahead so far right now just cause the action on the keys is way better, plus the case is way cooler Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WMcD Posted January 10, 2003 Share Posted January 10, 2003 The attached comes from Acoustical Engineering by Harry F. Olson. The standard is established by putting A above middle C at 440 Hz. I recall some tuning forks are marked as such. Each octave is a halving or doubling of frequency. In "equal temperment" each half note is 2^(1/12) = 1.0595 times the note below it. The math makes sense in that you go up 12 half notes to get to the next octave. Also you'll observe that the octave fret on the guitar effectively halfs the length of the string. Getting technical, equal temperment puts an E at 1.260 times a C. However, in Natural temperment, a third is 1.25 times the fundamental. Likewise in equal temperment a G is 1.498 times a C, whereas in natural temperment a fifth should be 1.5 time the fundamental. Gil Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jt1stcav Posted January 10, 2003 Share Posted January 10, 2003 Cool, prodj101. Hope the new reeds make that sax sound sweet! When I was 13, I wanted to learn to play the sax, but by the time I got around to registering for the class, all the cool kids already picked the sax or the trumpet. All that was left was either the flute (not the skin variety) or the clarinet, so I chose the latter. I just wasn't into the instrument, and lost interest quickly (when I'd practice at home, I'd break down the instrument like it was the stages of a rocket going into orbit...wow). I ended up dropping the class after the first semester! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jt1stcav Posted January 10, 2003 Share Posted January 10, 2003 Gil, so theoretically I wasn't even close, was I? Dammit, I wish I studied music theory and had the natural ability to play an instrument! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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