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Musical Instrument Acoustics

When you'll study it
Semester 2
CATS points
15
ECTS points
7.5
Level
Level 6
Module lead
Matthew Wright
Academic year
2025-26

Module overview

This module studies musical instruments from the orchestra and beyond, and applies engineering understanding of their physical mechanisms to explore why they sound the way they do. It also explores the issues raised by attempting to understand how an instrument works such as the psychology of subjective perceptions and how they can be quantified, the role of nonlinearity in determining the sound of an instrument and the effects of uncertainty and variability in characterising an ostensibly similar group of instruments. These are all issues which occur in a wide range of realworld engineering problems.