9. The Overtone Series and Timbre

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7 жыл бұрын

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When you pluck the A string on a guitar, it vibrates back and forth 110 times per second (or at 110 Hz). The vibration is then passed on to the hollow body of the guitar which vibrates at the same rate as the string, and amplifies the sound. But when you pluck the string, it doesn’t just vibrate back and forth at that one frequency. Actually, it vibrates at many different frequencies all at the same time, the lowest of which is 110 Hz - this is called the fundamental frequency.
But because the string is fixed at both ends, it can only vibrate in multiples of the fundamental frequency:
- The whole length of the string vibrates at the fundamental frequency of 110 Hz (this is AKA the 1st harmonic)
- The string can vibrate in halves = second harmonic (or the first overtone) at 220 Hz
- The string can also vibrate in thirds = third harmonic (or the second overtone) at 330 Hz
- The string can vibrate in quarters = fourth harmonic (or the third overtone) at 440 Hz
- And so on…
This is called the Overtone Series or the Harmonic Series - and it’s the basis of how we structure music, as we discover over the next few videos.
Some of the animations in this video were sourced from the below websites. A big thank you to them.
Title: Vibration_corde_trois_modes_petit.gif
Author: Christophe Dang Ngoc Chan
Link: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
Title: Vibration_corde_trois_harmoniques_combinees_petit.gif
Author: Christophe Dang Ngoc Chan
Link: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
Title: Bowed violin string in slow motion.gif
Author: ViolinB0W
Link: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported

Пікірлер: 185

@a_bush Жыл бұрын

This is the one most useful video on overtones and its topics I have found. Seeing the clip of the irregular string vibrating changed my idea on music in all. This video helped me understnd overtones and timbre really well, thanks

@atriagotler 2 жыл бұрын

Wow, I know nothing about music but I was doing a math class about harmonic series. Suddenly a video of overtone singing from 5 years ago popped up in my mind and I wondered if it is, in fact, a harmonic series thingy stuff... and well, that rabbit hole very soon brought me here! Awesome video

@taliesinmusic 4 жыл бұрын

brilliant video. But "the sound of a violin" sounds like a church organ

@eliascorrea8573 2 жыл бұрын

The violin has vibrato and many other dynamics naturally. You can't accurately recreate the sound of a violin only by changing what harmonic sounds the most but you can recreate it's timbre like he did in the video :)

@brendanschwarz 9 ай бұрын

Oh my god dude, I've been thinking/reading about this stuff for a long time and this is the first time I hear about the overtones arising from being unable to pluck the string starting at a perfect curve. That makes so much sense!

@someone6429 4 жыл бұрын

This was really useful for my physics subject

@Ginge2820 4 жыл бұрын

What an excellent video! I've been wondering about this stuff for a long time and you explained it very well :)

@AlreadyDawn 6 жыл бұрын

What an awesome tutorial. Well-explained and well-animated.

@rhythmharmony2923 3 жыл бұрын

Wow! I learned a lot in this video! It goes more in depth than my intonation class or other videos on harmonics.

@ylonmc2 7 жыл бұрын

Really enjoying this series. Thanks

@WalkThatBass 7 жыл бұрын

Glad to hear it :) Thanks for the comment.

@elvirjade4742 5 жыл бұрын

This was super helpful. As someone who just picked up music theory I have countless questions, but they are rarely answered. Thank you

@ffhashimi 6 жыл бұрын

Well done! this is a very interesting and useful series

@vincentl7007 4 жыл бұрын

Man, you are the best I found yet on youtube to explain musics math in details. I'll listen eagerly each and every part. You got a sub and as many likes as you have videos. Thank you so much!!!!!

@ivankorablev-dyson8281 3 жыл бұрын

thank you so much! one of the best videos i've seen about overtones! and all slo mo vids and software demos were very helpful for deeper understanding!!!

@praveenabeysinghe6038 3 жыл бұрын

soooo perfect, i really understood about the notes and everything through this video. Thanks a lot❤️❤️❤️

@abrogard142 Жыл бұрын

never knew that before. so beautifully simple when you see it illustrated. the harmonics are 'waves on the wave'. You can even see it on a skipping rope I reckon. Get it going round - there's your fundamental - and then with a bit of flick of the wrist you can send a wave along the length of it to the other person - that'd be the mixture of harmonics. That's what that shot of the guitar string revealed. Beautiful, entirely.

@evoluti0n09 2 жыл бұрын

Perfectly clear and concise, great work!!

@kykwan49 5 жыл бұрын

Thank you. Excellent lecture. Even though the materials in this video are quite fundamental, but the way you explained it really help me to have a better understanding of sound and music.

@JetBob84 2 жыл бұрын

Wow!! This is EXCELLENT! You put a lot of time into this, and I want to thank you very much....it was time very well spent.

@palashmyaccount 2 жыл бұрын

Brilliantly explained. Keep up the great work!

@TheBlazinAsian96 5 жыл бұрын

Comprehensive and concise, thank you very much for this!

@dilippawse9898 Жыл бұрын

Thanks. Very well explained. Understood the physics behind the musical instruments ...A perfect blend of an musician and a Physicist.

@kori4580 5 жыл бұрын

Thank you...this helped me with studying for the MCAT!

@justaperson1812 Жыл бұрын

this is absolutely fascinating

@drdca8263 Жыл бұрын

Very nice! This answered many of my questions!

@samcarsonx Жыл бұрын

I learned about this a few years ago but I needed to touch up on my knowledge and this helped tremendously! Thank you :)

@JamesAGuitar 5 жыл бұрын

Fantastic explanation and examples!

@haripanditparanjpe30 3 жыл бұрын

Wow amazingly simplified explanation 👌

@stoneandpithos Жыл бұрын

Wonderful video!

@kukitoo22 3 жыл бұрын

You are really good at explaining dude, thanks a bunch!

@elementz018 6 жыл бұрын

Really helpful. Especially gives me inspiration to "forge" an instrument digitally through wave tables and oscillators.

@Maxim_Corp 3 жыл бұрын

Yo saaaame

@MelloCello7 4 жыл бұрын

Excellent video my friend!

@chandanonline Жыл бұрын

Great video 👏👏👏

@annschwaar5772 3 жыл бұрын

Super clear and helpful! Thank you!

@totfosk Жыл бұрын

this video is gold with gold and sugar and gold again

@martaabadtorrent4263 4 жыл бұрын

Brilliant! Thank you so much!

@aaron9296 3 жыл бұрын

This was excellently explained thank you very much.

@aku7598 5 жыл бұрын

Very good physics explanation on musical notes production. The pitch is seemed to be determine between the points where ALL the waves are at zero amplitude.

@tomlavelle8518 3 жыл бұрын

Thank you for the clear explanations!!

@innocentoctave 7 жыл бұрын

A very clear explanation.

@WalkThatBass 7 жыл бұрын

Thanks, Paul :)

@siwulf7539 4 жыл бұрын

holy cow your videos are so good!

@Anuradha-lb3le 3 жыл бұрын

Really informative series

@dariountama1784 3 жыл бұрын

Great video!

@MusicOscillations 3 жыл бұрын

Your Videos were my wish and you made my wish come true. A wish of understanding and to find answers to my Questions. Thank you.

@lordviewer7305 3 жыл бұрын

Pretty awesome video thanks

@davidfrankelguitar 10 ай бұрын

Brilliant!!!

@abhishekbijlwan5324 3 жыл бұрын

Thanks a lot.. was looking just for this :)

@mylesfranco3545 2 жыл бұрын

wow, this is the best explanation iv seen

@mikeguitar-michelerossi8195 4 жыл бұрын

Great video! I'll make a serie on my channel on Home Recording next weeks and I'll surely recomand this video to the people who want to learn more! Thank you!

@hugoponssegovia3987 4 жыл бұрын

Best explanation

@WOHEI62X 7 жыл бұрын

The best animation I´ve ever seen

@WalkThatBass 7 жыл бұрын

Thanks :) Very nice of you to say...though perhaps a slight exaggeration.

@peterwood-jenkins3634 4 жыл бұрын

BRILLIANTLY EXPLAINED Many Frequencies playing at once on any note ,of the fundamental Most here will find that difficult to take in , but its a fact Some better singers have more overtones in their voices making a richer sound

@Tracks777 7 жыл бұрын

Lovely content! Keep it up!

@WalkThatBass 7 жыл бұрын

Cheers, will do.

@zhouryan6960 3 жыл бұрын

best tutorial

@6hypnone 3 жыл бұрын

Awesome. So this is why, all other things equal, no 2 voices sound the same.

@laurastackmusic 4 жыл бұрын

Awesome. Thanks!

@jackh6534 3 жыл бұрын

Thank you so much. This is so fascinating to learn about, and I can't appreciate enough the way you're able to present it in a way that is so easy to understand. You are such a fantastic teacher!

@TheZammySam 6 жыл бұрын

This is very helpful thanks

@LAM1895 2 жыл бұрын

Very interesting. I was wondering how it could be possible to recognize an instrument based on a spectrogram of its sound. You said violin had certain predominant harmonics, is there a comprehensive list of characteristic harmonics for every instruments out there? I would appreciate any pertinent links.

@ParsevalMusic Жыл бұрын

fantasticccc

@SilverHeadim 2 жыл бұрын

thanks a lot !

@matteo8931 5 жыл бұрын

MINDBLOWN

@hidgik 5 жыл бұрын

Please also do a video about overtones in a flute. Thanx. This video was an eye (ear) opener .;}

@overtonefinds6385 4 жыл бұрын

when you pluck the A string on a "GEETSAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH"

@HuyLe-hl7qp 6 жыл бұрын

How do you find the favored harmonics of different instruments?

@PhilipChristian 4 жыл бұрын

Unreal 👏

@Maratusvolans 6 жыл бұрын

Cool video! Just one thing, at 9:44, I believe the reeds of woodwinds and the lips of brass players are the things that cause the air to vibrate in those instruments, like the strings. Maybe you were thinking about flutes?

@mikelpradet6670 6 жыл бұрын

Great!!!

@Pajonear 3 жыл бұрын

i have no music theory background, just fidling in my pc and i always wondered about overtones on basses for example, like how can bass in F# have overtone A# that doesnt fit into my F# minor scale and sometimes it made me to stop in progress because i was so confused and thought that it will sound ,,not in scale" and bad (ye i dont really trust my ears about ,,music being correct")...after years i wanted to find out and this was sooooo helpful man. thank you so much

@sunimod1895 4 жыл бұрын

Great video! I am self-studying overtones because I am interested why my open cello strings vibrate even when I don't play them.

@jellybean2619 2 жыл бұрын

i play the cello too! it's called synthetic vibration, when you play the same note on another string:)

@joaoomar3613 2 жыл бұрын

Yeah, synthetic vibration is also why drums don't have notes, because one side of the drum is tuned to onde note and the onther side tuned to a different note, which makes the sound "die" inside the drum. Sometimes when I'm talking with someone that's distant from me, i can hear one of my guitar strings vibrate, probably because I sad something in the same pitch very loudly.

@jonnyhotchkiss9522 2 ай бұрын

Wow. Amazing videos and explanation. 6mins in, wondering with the flute vs the violin, and the dominant harmonic being the fundamental or the 2nd, and the subsequent harmonic series (248 for violin vs f+3 for flute) is that common across instrument types, or inferable in anyway? Similarly with the selected amplitudes were they calculated? Really great presentation and explanation 👍🏻👍🏻

@StevenWallerstein Жыл бұрын

Fantastic! Just what I was looking for. I've wondered for some time: How do we know it's Frank Sinatra singing a middle C and not a piano playing Middle C. Overtones I guess. At about 5:35 the video shows the Synth Oscillator which is some kind of overtone graphic equalizer thingie. Is there one of these that we can play with somewhere online? And/or can we see the differences between instruments and voices on a Synth Oscillator somewhere? Thanks

@TorkilZachariassenTZNG 7 жыл бұрын

It might be worth mentioning that the first nine harmonics starting from A are exactly, or very close to, the tones A A E A C# E G A B which might be described a particular voicing of the chord A9 even if only one low A I'd actually played. Í other words: The A string contains an A, A7 and a A9 chord. It works the other way around as well. Play A E C# E G A B and your brain might choose to fill in an extra lower, subharmonic, A in order to complete the pattern above.

@ThePi314Man 7 жыл бұрын

Torkil Zachariassen As well, the ascending ratios of notes follow the Fibonacci sequence.

@alexshih3747 6 жыл бұрын

Not to be pedantic, but C# and G are quite noticeably different from the true harmonics that come from the overtone series.

@johnm5321 3 жыл бұрын

How does the shape of motion in the slowed down recording of a violin string vibrating (2:54) or the gif of the combined harmonics (2:39) resemble/relate to the wave shape? can you see the wave shape from the behavior of the string? Are they different because of the visual demonstration of the longitudinal wave?

@crrs2332 3 жыл бұрын

the Angels numbers. you explained it finally . timbre tambor - it how things go out of tune and frequency .

@TheRealUncleScar Жыл бұрын

I know this video has been out a while, but another reason piano timbre changes up the scales is because the ratio of string length to where the hammer hits is also different. A few inches on a 5' string is a much smaller ratio than a single inch on a 10" string. The hammer hits much closer to the end of the string on the longer one and much closer to the middle on the shorter one, even if raw distance is smaller. Those are not exact numbers but I hope they show the point.

@gillianomotoso328 5 жыл бұрын

5:26 - So a violin is periodic in its harmonics while very concentrated at the fundamental, while a flute has very few overtones, with exception to a little whiff sticking out at the 3rd harmonic! Pure & robust vs. pure & sinewy :)

@abrogard142 Жыл бұрын

I would like to know where we can get this ADSynth software he's using. Google seems very shy of revealing any info on it to me... though I got the impression it should be freeware...

@kariknudsen9058 4 ай бұрын

Hi! I am looking for a way to measure wich overtones are more or less dominant when I am bowing in different ways on a violin. I want to know what I hear. Can you help? Any app or other tool? ❤

@KarmaflaxMedia 7 жыл бұрын

Interesting :3

@MelloCello7 4 жыл бұрын

Could you by any chance explain why some harmonics get softer and die off eventually?? My thinking is that since they have smaller amplitudes, they may be bullied out by the larger amplitude ones, but i could be very wrong, some help would be great thankyou!

@WimBlock 6 жыл бұрын

Hi, my music teacher tell's me that B and G string are more often out of tune than other strings on a guitar. I hope to know something about stress in materials and things like that and hopefully one day able to build my own guitar. I've never heard this before and at this point I'm unable to match this in my technical background. I'm not sure if this is true or based on some of his personal experience... Is it just a coincidence? If truly so, whats the reason for this? (I don't mean any bridge or tuning machine's issue's here)

@ogorangeduck 3 жыл бұрын

That's because the equal temperament system (the tuning system Western music uses nowadays) makes the third fairly sharp, and B and G are a third apart, so that third is harder to make sound right (it's also psychological, as the two strings can be perfectly in tune and still sound off compared to the other strings)

@NcMuggets 3 жыл бұрын

Strings going out of tune have nothing to do with temperament.

@pherickniartallagh2813 7 жыл бұрын

This concept of higher order modes of oscillation has everything to do with how an instrument body amplifies, too. A guitar body has modes and overtones just like a string. So does the volume of air in the guitar. A video/image search for "modes oscillation guitar soundboard" or "chladni plates" is illustrative of this idea moving from one dimension to two. It's cool how much more complicated the patterns are.

@abhijeethnair2052 2 жыл бұрын

sir which software are you using to generate tones. Please do tell i want to use it my research topic

@JohnSmith-iu3jg 6 жыл бұрын

The relationship between string length and frequency is not direct; it's inversely proportional.

@methandtopology 5 жыл бұрын

And that is because the string length is proportional to the wavelength, and given a specific string acting as a medium for the wave, the speed is constant. Therefore, to satisfy v=fλ, any change in the string length inversely changes the frequency.

@tejabommireddy5665 3 жыл бұрын

@@methandtopology h

@oceanman6623 4 жыл бұрын

This lesson is fucking beautiful!

@rameezwaniii 3 жыл бұрын

what sets up the string to fundamental frequency?

@wiegraf9009 Жыл бұрын

Just to get this straight, if I pluck middle C and then one octave up the shorter string will translate the same amount of kinetic energy into a higher pitched frequency because the rate of oscillation is higher, but the timbre will generally be identical because the materials of the instrument are identical and the string lengths are geometrically proportional to each other. In this way we get the same harmonics at a higher or lower pitch and therefore it makes sense to call both of these notes "C." Is this correct?

@fredashay 2 жыл бұрын

What would happen if you create several sine waves that are harmonic to each other (110 Hz, 220 Hz, 440Hz, etc) but shift the nodes so they don't line up? Will it sound different?

@JorgeTabaresMusic 6 жыл бұрын

Incredible video! Very well and methodically taught! Could you recommend some good books to read about this? A small blibliography we could also read? Thank you!

@WalkThatBass 6 жыл бұрын

Hi Jorge. The following are both good resources: How Music Works ~ John Powell The Physics of Sound ~ Richard E. Berg

@JorgeTabaresMusic 6 жыл бұрын

Thank you! I appreciate it. I just discovered your channel and am enjoying your videos very much.

@oboealto 4 жыл бұрын

A question on the harmonic series. So we know that if we start at 110 Hz, the third harmonic is 330 Hz (i.e. 1/3), but what about the mirrored node (i.e. 2/3) at 165 Hz? Same goes for the 4th harmonic. 440 Hz (i.e. 1/4) is OK, but why not also 146.67 Hz (i.e. node 3/4)?

@anddream749 5 жыл бұрын

what is sound note ? note and tone are same things ?

@euryhong431 2 жыл бұрын

💖💖

@malexmartinez4007 2 жыл бұрын

How will it sound if we stack overtones using just sine waves?

@davidcorning1738 4 жыл бұрын

I got the software you said at 5:36, but I don't find anything that looks like what you have at 5:36. How do I get that so I can see a frequency and the various over tones as I add them?

@WalkThatBass 4 жыл бұрын

It's an instrument called ZynAddSubFX in LMMS. Found a short tutorial of it online. Try that. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/g8Wff7aTmqqtoIE.html