Physics Asked on August 9, 2021
These are the questions I read through before asking this:
What I’m trying to understand (generally) is the effects of a guitar body on sound. In particular, tones being played either into the cavity or onto the face.
Here’s my questions:
To what non-numerical degree are guitar bodies similar to formants? If one used a speaker to play pure tones into the cavity, would they find a meaningfully "bumpy" response? (in no way linear nor any other smooth function)
If #1 is "depends on the guitar," is this the reason for its shape and the craftsmanship involved with instrument making?
Does the non-linear response of the guitar body (and all physical bodies) create any overtones? If you took a surface transducer and played pure tones, would the non-linear response of the guitar body create any meaningful overtones?
For further insight into what I’m trying to answer, here’s my intuition for the three above:
Be careful with the term "nonlinearity". The guitar as a vibrating system is linear, but the frequency response is of course not a linear function of frequency (which is a completely different thing than the system being nonlinear).
I know of no nonlinear musical instruments outside of electronic music, but that may be a limitation of my knowledge. In electronic music, the non-linearity is most often applied only to single voices, because otherwise it will often sound noisy. Intermodulation is characterized by not only adding overtones (whole multiples of the base frequency), but rather fractional multiples and sum/difference frequencies. This is what makes nonlinearity sound noisy when multiple tones are played at the same time.
Correct answer by oliver on August 9, 2021
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