‘SPEECH, MUSIC, AND NOISE 101 Wind Instruments Resonances in the three-dimensional room are discussed in detail in Chap. 15. In many musical instruments, resonance in pipes or tubes must be considered primarily one dimensional. Standing-wave effects are dominant in pipes. If air is enclosed in a narrow pipe closed at both ends, the fundamental (twice the length of the pipe) and all its har- monics will be formed. Resonances are formed in a pipe open at only one end at the frequency at which the pipe length is four times the wavelength, and results in odd harmonics. Wind instruments form tein suuuds this way, the length of he luau uf ais is wutinuvusly varied, as in the slide trombone, or in jumps as in the trumpet or Fronch horn, or by opening or closing holes along its length as in the saxophone, flute, clarinet, and oboe. ‘The harmonic content of several wind instruments is compared to that of the violin in the spectrograms of Fig. 5-10. Rach instrument has its characteristic timbre as determined by the number and strength of its harmonics and by the formant shaping of the train of harmonics by the structural resonances of the instrument. Nonharmonic Overtones Harvey Fletcher tried to synthesize piano sounds. It was emphasized that piano strings are stiff strings and vibrate like a combination of solid rods and stretched strings. This means that the piano overtones are not strictly harmonic. Bells produce a wild mixture of overtones, and the fimdamental is not even graced with thatname among specialists in the field. ‘The overtones of drums are not harmonically related, although they give a richness to he drum sound. Triangles and cymbals give such a mixture of overtones that they blend reasonably well with other instruments. Nonhamonic overtones produce the difference between organ and piano sounds and give variety to musical sounds in general. Dynamic Range of Speech and Music Tn the concert hall, a full symphony orchestra is capable of producing some very loud sounds when the score says so, but also soft, delicate passages. Seated in the audience. one can fully appreciate this grand sweep of sound due to the great dynamic range of the human eer. The dynamic range between the loudest and the softest passage will be on the order of 60 to 70 AB. To be effective, the soft passages must still be102 Harter Five 238 ase 7 ht 6 5 42 1 fo 8 3 6 2 4 1 07 Fite Clarinet. === Oboe == Trumpet Trumpet_——_-Viatin mouthpiece Tone: middle A (440 cycles) Spectiogram comparison of the harmonic content of woodwind instruments and the violin as middle A (440 H2) is played. The differences displayed account for the difference in timbre of the different instruments. ATT Bell Laboratories. above the ambient background noise in the hall, hence the emphasis on adequate structural isolation to protect against traffic and other out- side noises, and precautions to ensure that air-handling equipment noise is low. For those not present in the music hall, AM or FM radio, television, magnetic recordings, or disc recordings must suffice. These conven- tional media are unable to handle the full dynamic range of the orches- xtreme tra. Noise at the lower extreme and distortion at the uppe! introduce limitations. In the case of broadcast media, there are the added regulatory restrictions prohibiting interference with adjacent channels. Digital audio has brought some major revisions of our thinking in regard to dynamic range and sigual-to-noise ratio. The dynamic rage in a digital system is directly related to the range of binary digits (bits).‘SPEECH, MUSIC, AND NOISE 1 03 Number of binary digits Dynamic range, dB 4 26 R aR 12 72 16 96 24 144 The theoretical 96-B dynamic range provided by the 16-bit di system is staggering to someone steeped in the traditional techniques At last there is a recording system that handles the concert hall dynamic range reasonably well. he commercial compact disc (CD) is capable of carrying 74 minutes of full-fidelity music with a 96 dB sig- nal-to-noise ratio. The digital audio cassette is another worthy addi- tion to the recording/playback arsenal, as well as digital audio tape (DAT) systems. Digital techniques have transferred dynamic range limitations from the medium to the concert hall on the one hand and the playback environment on the other However, in recent years the audio community has grown dissatis- fied with the quantization noise and “graininess” of 16-bit digital audio, New 24-bit formats are on the rise, such as “Super Audio CD” and “Audio DVD." In addition, professional audio mastering engi- neers are now working in 24-bit resolution to avoid the audibility of digital artifacts resulting from lower-resolution processing, Power in Speech and Music Jn learning more about the various signals to be handled, one must consider the peak power of various sources. For speech, the average power is only about 10 microwatts, but peaks might reach a milliwatt. Mos! of the power of speech is in the low frequencies, with 80 percent below 500 Hz, yet there is very little power below 100 Hz. On the other hand, the small amount of power in the high frequencies determines the intelligibility of speech and thus is very important because that is where the consonants are. The peak power of verious musical instru- ments is listed in Table 5: