How precisely does an acoustic guitar or violin produce its sweet sound? There is a simple, centuries-old way to literally "see" the vibrational patterns that cause the guitar to resonate and produce ...

The octobass is a huge stringed instrument that is twice the size of a double bass when standing, about 3.6 meters, and the strings cannot be pressed as they are, so the strings are pressed with a ...

Seventeen centuries before the German Hornbostel-Sachs system, India's Natya Shastra had already sorted every musical ...

Abrasive, intense and about to erupt at any moment. So begins Flow, a new piece by Nokuthula Ngwenyama for the Takács Quartet. Coaxing peculiar sounds out of centuries-old string instruments, the ...

Imagine a sound, a tone. Engineering and math might go into creating a musical instrument that can make that tone, but that same sound also depends on acoustics, perception, creativity — a multitude ...

At the heart of many of the world’s musical instruments is the same, simple component—a string stretched tight between two points. Plucked, bowed, or struck, each of an instrument’s strings creates ...

When worshippers arrive at Salem Lutheran Church in Tomball for Christmas Eve services, they'll enter more than a sanctuary. They'll be stepping into a musical instrument. Its strings will span the ...

Crisp, warm, responsive. The National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) is on a journey to meet these benchmarks under the baton of music director Gianandrea Noseda. One of the ways in which he's shaping a new ...