Welcome to the Home page for Physics 1600: The Physics of Music at Middle Tennessee State University.  The purpose of the web pages that link off this page is to provide a number of items

• course syllabus, course requirements, and contact information for me Dr. Robertson
• a summary of the material covered in the lecture (NOT a substitute for attending the lecture in person)
• some supplementary links, demonstrations, and information
• homework problems for you to test your understanding.

Course Materials

• The Syllabus
• Special Project requirements and ideas
• Dr. Robertson's Home Page

Contact the Instructor

• E-mail me a question.

Lecture Materials

The syllabus gives an approximate schedule of when the following lectures will be given in class.  As you will soon find out I may not always keep to the schedule; however, it will be pretty obvious from the class what topic we are covering.  It needs to be emphasized that the following web pages are merely supplemental.  I will cover the material in more detail in class.  Furthermore, in making up the quizzes I tend to draw on subjects that crop up as questions or areas of particular emphasis in class.  In other words do not be tempted to substitute the online documents for coming to class--it will hurt your grade, plus you will miss the myriad of cool demos that I try to mix in throughout the semester!

• Measurements and Units
• The Simple Harmonic Oscillator
• Waves
• Structure of the ear
• Loudness and Decibels
• Standing Waves
• Pure and complex tones
• Ohm's Law of Hearing
• Time, Frequency and spectrum
• Musical Intervals and Scales
• "Scientific" theory of consonance
• Room Acoustics

Tools:  A big component of many of the special projects involves taking a spectrum of the instrument you build.  The link below takes you to a nice little freeware tool for the PC that lets you acquire a spectrum from a sound file recording (.wav file). It also does much more. http://www.audacityteam.org/

Miscellaneous:  Here are links to some extraneous acoustic demos, knick-knacks, and other weakly relevant items concerned with acoustics that I have created.

• Acoustic Demos I have made
• Physics of the Didjeridu
• BBC World Service Interview