Physics of percussion instruments

Post date: Mar 17, 2015 6:03:16 AM

Here are the quick notes from the masterclass, just basically listing the topics we discussed:

Physics of Percussion Instruments

some related resources:

Measured Tones was the most enjoyable introduction to physics and music I read, although admittedly the focus is more on pitched instruments. The preceding link is for the 2nd edition which is the one I read, and apparently the 3rd edition has more information about psychoacoustics and digital compression (e.g. mp3) and percussion instruments like gamelan.

The most comprehensive look at percussion instruments would be Thomas Rossing's great text; a bit drier in style than above but it covers everything well.

A little further off topic but still related are Gareth Loy's two volumes of Musimathics which are a lot of fun to read and offer a musician with little mathematic training an exposure to key concepts and terminology. He gets right into the math, if you're up for it.