Scan 72
The American history and encyclopedia of music, 1908
8 lines. Read by computer on 11 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Spain, and thence to the rest of Europe. The steps by which the progress continued are defaced by time, but there are chance glimmerings which reveal the general trend of the way.
3The maker of musical instruments must know many intricate laws of acoustics in order to construct instruments capable of producing musical tones as designed. The maker may not know the laws as the physicist knows them, and it is doubtful if he could write a treatise concerning what he does know and why it is true. The knowledge has grown with experience, and has been handed down through the generations, until during the last few centuries the science of acoustics has added new knowledge and made clear the old.
5It has been explained that musical tones are groups of sound vibrations, and that these groups differ in pitch, loudness and timbre. In producing instrumental music, the performer can determine the loudness to a degree, but the instrument-maker must determine the pitch and timbre. The longer the vibrating string or column of air, the deeper will be the pitch, and to accommodate the longer string or column, the instrument must be proportionately large. The vibrations of the strings of the violin and the piano do not differ in a degree sufficient to account for the great difference in the tone of the two instruments. Instead, the cause is the dissimilar surroundings and manner of causing vibrations. The instrument-maker considers the vibrations much as the modeler does his clay, fashioning the groups so that they may have the proper timbre. He selects and arranges that which produces the vibrations, in such a manner that the fundamental may be accompanied by the correct number of partials to form a given tone, and adds still more character to the tone by the means employed in creating the vibrations.
7The instruments used in the production of musical sounds, when considered with regard to that which produces the sound vibrations, fall into four general divisions: Sonorous substances, vibrating membranes, wind instruments,
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