Physics of Music is an open textbook about how musical sound is made, how it travels, and how it is heard. It begins with a vibrating object and ends with a recording of one, and along the way it asks the questions a musician asks and answers them with physics: why a string sounds a pitch at all, why a clarinet and a trumpet playing the same note are unmistakably different, why some pairs of notes sound settled and others restless, why a piano cannot be tuned perfectly, and why the same quartet sounds glorious in one hall and muddy in the next.
No calculus is required. The main argument runs on algebra, trigonometry, and ratios; the derivations that genuinely need calculus are set aside in dropdowns that can be opened or ignored. No musical training is assumed either — the notation the book uses is introduced where it is first needed. See the Preface for the audience, the organization, and how the printed editions differ.
Where the text describes a sound, there is usually a figure showing what is in it and a link to hear it; where a moving picture teaches more than a static one, the web edition has a running simulation. Every sound example is synthesized rather than recorded, so that a comparison can hold everything fixed but the one thing it is about.
Contents¶
- Physics of Music
- Preface
- Sound, Music, and Simple Harmonic Motion
- Wave Motion and the Speed of Sound
- Superposition, Interference, and Standing Waves
- Resonance and Normal Modes
- Fourier Analysis, Harmonics, and Timbre
- The Ear and the Physiology of Hearing
- Loudness, Decibels, and Equal-Loudness Contours
- Pitch, Beats, Consonance, and Dissonance
- Musical Scales and Tuning Systems
- String Instruments: Guitar, Violin, and Piano
- Wind Instruments and Air-Column Resonance
- Percussion: Membranes, Bars, and Plates
- The Singing Voice
- Room Acoustics and Concert-Hall Design
- Electronic and Recorded Sound
- Teaching Guide
- Laboratory Exercises
- The Final Project
- Glossary
Downloadable editions¶
The website may contain changes made after these downloadable editions were exported.
PDF with worked solutions — exported 2026-10-01, revision b26d969.
PDF with exercises only — exported 2026-10-01, revision b26d969.
Word edition — exported 2026-10-01, revision b26d969.
License¶
© 2026 Martin Veillette. This book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0).
This book adapts openly licensed content from several sources; see
SOURCES.md
for the per-chapter attribution ledger.