Spectral analysis of musical sounds with emphasis on the piano

There are three parts to this book which addresses the analysis of musical sounds from the viewpoint of someone at the intersection between physicists, engineers, piano technicians, and musicians. The reader is introduced to a variety of waves and a variety of ways of presenting, visualizing, and analyzing them in the first part. A tutorial on the tools used throughout the book accompanies this introduction. The mathematics behind the tools is left to the appendices. Part 2 is a graphical survey of the classical areas of acoustics that pertain to musical instruments: vibrating strings, bars, membranes, and plates. Part 3 is devoted almost exclusively to the piano. Several two- and three-dimensional graphical tools are introduced to study the following characteristics of pianos: individual notes and interactions among them, the missing fundamental, inharmonicity, tuning visualization, the different distribution of harmonic power for the various zones of the piano keyboard, and potential uses for quality control. These techniques are also briefly applied to other musical instruments studied in earlier parts of the book. The book includes appendices to cover the mathematics lurking beneath the numerous graphs, and a brief introduction to Matlab® which was used to generate those graphs.