CONCEPTS OF MUSIC WEEK 4 GOOD VIBRATIONS

Good vibrations indeed! A meaty lecture to be sure and a thoroughly enjoyable excursion into the workings of sound. What is more confusing for yours truly was the analysis of well... the analysis of sound. I spent some time this afternoon looking at Fourier Transformations in the broadest possible sense. There’s a lot of chunky maths there that I simply didn’t bother with but I noticed in my internet meanderings that the applications of Fourier analysis seem vast, from engineering to digital multimedia. I think the theorem provides a method by which complex wave forms (or functions) can be represented as sine waves of different frequencies which sum the original wave form. This probably answers the question I asked in my Audio Studies blog this week about how complex waveforms are acoustically represented by audio equipment... or does it? How deep my understanding of this concept needs to be is something I’m not certain of at this point in my aural studies life, but I hope to find out. The beautiful harmonic series was explained; this concept I dealt with more easily as I remember it somewhat from high school music and physics both (I should probably remember the Fourier Transforms as well but...) and I enjoyed immensely Stephens manic pipe-twirling demonstration of same. Whatever shenanigans will he entertain us with next week? Great fun.