Can Music Change Your Life?

In music there are a variety of instruments that display the color of harmonies, when they are played in an orchestra or a band. The ranges of their sounds spans from the lowest pitch of a contrabass to the highest pitch of a piccolo. Moreover their classification derives by the group or section to which they belong.

The classification of instruments in music is divided into three broad classes or families which are percussion, string and wind. Many instruments have more than one characteristic and fall into more than one class. The piano, for example, is a string instrument as well as a percussion instrument.

In the performance of percussion instruments, there are several of them that are executed in two ways. For instance some of these instruments are played with the palms of the hands or by using wooden sticks. The procedure when playing with the palms of the hand is as follow: both hands tap or strike simultaneously the head of the drum. In order to produce a different sound at the same time, the performer places one hand on the calfskin of the drum while strikes it with the other. The strength of the strike depends on the type of dynamic the performer is using.

In the string section we find instruments like the piano, the contrabass, the violoncello, the viola and the violin. As it was mentioned before, the piano besides being a percussion instrument it also has the characteristics of a string instruments. The description of the piano is very complex but it can be described as a keyboard musical instrument having wire strings that sound when struck by felt-covered hammers operated from a keyboard. The standard modern piano contains 88 keys. Since most of the time the task of the piano is to play several notes at the same time, this very function brings multiple sounds that accompany any peace of music. This type of accompaniment is usually referred as the chord progression.

There are five families of the woodwind category. The family includes flute, clarinet, saxophone, oboe and bassoon. Most woodwind instruments are tubes of wood that are blown into to make sound. "During the twentieth century, however, piccolos and flutes came to be made of metal". They can have a bell shaped bottom or be one size tube all the way down the instrument. Each woodwind instrument varies the pitch by opening and closing padded or non padded holes that are placed all down and along the instrument. The way a woodwind instrument works with pitch is, the longer you create the resonating tube (by opening and covering holes), and the lower the pitch sounds. This is why the number of keys and holes that are covered correlate to the pitch of the instrument. Compared to the string instruments, the woodwinds are less alike in tone color.

Sound waves and oscillators

Sounds are pressure waves which travel through air, or another medium, to our ears. Unlike waves in the ocean, which move up and ...