Editor’s note: Arachnophonia (“Arachno” = spider / “-phonia” = sound) is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.
All links included in these posts will take you to either the library catalog record for the item in question or to additional relevant information from around the web.
Today’s installment of Arachnophonia is by student manager Brianna (class of 2023) and features a book about how physics applies to music. Thanks, Brianna!
The Physics of Musical Instruments
by Neville H. Fletcher and Thomas D. Rossing
This book is an amazing introduction into the physics of acoustics, as well as all types of musical instruments. It may come as no surprise that scholarship on the physics of instruments has become much more popular as technology has been developed that allows us to answer questions about instruments in detail. Fletcher summarizes this scholarship in a cohesive and reader-friendly way, providing the physical background information needed to understand topics such as the physics of a horn, how a bowed string behaves, the importance of the violin body, etc. I find this to be a great example of the way that music interacts with all subjects and how applications of sciences to the musical arts allows us to have a deeper understanding of what we are doing when we play an instrument.
