Music post 1

The dots above represent air molecules oscillating back and forth. The curve below is not the motion of the particles—it is a graph of pressure variation.

Together, they describe the same travelling sound wave.

This post is the first in a short series where I try to understand music from a physicist’s point of view.

We’ll start with the simplest question—what is a note?—and build up to things like timbre, why guitars have frets where they do, and why the circle of fifths works at all. Intuition for Sound of Music