Acoustics of musical instruments - why is a saxophone like a violin?

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• Professor Jim Woodhouse ( CUED)
• Monday 17 March 2025, 18:00-19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Beverley Larner.

Musical instruments like the clarinet and saxophone do not obviously have anything in common with a bowed violin string. This talk will explore the physics behind how these instruments work, and it will reveal some unexpectedly strong parallels between them. This is all the more surprising because all of them rely on strongly nonlinear phenomena, and nonlinear systems are notoriously tricky: significant commonalities between disparate systems are rare. For all the instruments, computer simulations will be used to give some insight into questions a musician may ask: What variables must a player control, and how? Why are some instruments “easier to play” than others?

This talk is part of the Cambridge Philosophical Society series.

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