Hi, my name is Drew Lytle, and I want to tell you a story, and for this one, I recommend
wearing headphones.
I want you to listen to something.
That was middle C played on a bunch of different instruments.
So, a question for you, why do they sound different?
Weird thing to think about, right?
Your initial thought might be that it's the difference in shape or material, and you’d
be right, but to fully understand how all of these unique sounds can come together to
produce music, we need to talk about physics.
See, music, like all sound, is created from waves.
Each soundwave has a particular frequency, and as the wave moves through the air, that
frequency is what we perceive as pitch.
Middle C, for instance, has a frequency of 261.6 HZ; and it sounds like this.
But you’ll notice that that doesn’t sound like any of the instruments we heard before,
right?
Here’s the cello playing the C again, and here’s the pure C pitch.
Completely different.
The pure C sounds cold and boring.
That’s because when we sing or play instruments, we’re never producing only one soundwave;
each note is made of multiple waves combined.
I know, that sounds insane, but we can actually hear this if we listen closely.
As the cello plays the C, I’ll just softly play the ones I hear so you can try to listen
for them.
There’s the octave above, the one below, and a little bit of the fifth.
If you didn’t hear those notes, keep practicing and listening; replay the video if you need
to, because once you hear them, it makes music different, fuller, it’s like every note
is it’s own chord!
And those are just the ones we can easily hear.
If we graph the frequency spectrums for the cello, piano, and the trumpet, we see that
there are a lot more.
What’s really cool, is that all of the frequencies line up regardless of the instrument.
Here’s the fundamental, the octave, the fifth, the next octave, the third so on and
so forth.
This pattern is called the overtone series, and what gives an instrument its unique sound
or timbre is just the differing volumes of these frequencies.
That’s it!
What’s really amazing, though, is that when these frequencies are all in tune with each
other, their volumes are added together and sometimes a frequency in the overtone series
is so in tune and becomes so loud that it sounds like there is another instrument playing
that note.
This phenomenon is called an overtone and it’s one of the hardest things for musicians
to create together.
And learning about how it works reminded me of something my high school choir director
used to say during difficult rehearsals, “Music isn’t magic”.
And what she meant by that is music is really hard work.
It takes a lot of time and deliberate practice from everyone involved to create something
beautiful.
But, if in that moment of beauty we create something literally out of thin air, than
I think Music is magic, it’s just getting there that isn’t.
And it’s kind of profound when you put it in the context of choral music.
Humans don’t have valves and strings we can manipulate to match our fundamental frequencies.
Our bodies are not designed so we have a matching timbre.
The only way for us to tune and get to that moment of magic is by listening to each other
and collectively compromising our individual voices to create an ideal sound.
We have to think about being a piece of something bigger than ourselves and ensure that we are
positively influencing the whole.
And when we all do that together, in perfect harmony, we create a magical effect that couldn’t
be achieved by any of us alone.
And this is a lesson we desperately need to remember in our current political climate.
If we want to solve problems, we can’t get there by drowning others out and believing
that the song is a solo.
We need to listen to those around us, balance the sound so everyone is heard, and find a
compromise between our individual beliefs and actions that benefit the collective.
Because when we do that we are in tune, we are unified, and we have the opportunity to
accomplish things that none of us could alone.
When it happens it’s magic, it’s getting there that isn’t.
Thanks for watching.
I am a firm believer that the arts are an integral part of a civil education.
If I’ve proven that to you in this video, make sure your local representatives and school
board members keep these programs in their budgets.
Share this video with them.
I would like to thank my middle and high school teachers for molding me into the creative,
critical thinker I am today.
I’d like to thank my patrons on Patreon including Harry and Erika Lister, the jeans
Family, the Lawson Family, Andrew James, and my parents; you all are instrumental in making
these videos possible and helping me achieve this dream of educating through story.
If you want to help grow Curiository and make this channel bigger than me in my bedroom,
head on over to patreon.com/curiository.
Thanks as always for watching, and I’ll see you next time.