![]() Ian Noyce is a brilliant guitar maker, (called a “luthier”), right here in Melbourne Australia. There is a great detailed article about Pythagoras and fret spacing on the Noyce Guitar page at the following link: These Pythagoras fraction values are still used today when making guitars. (Click the above picture to enlarge to full screen).Īs can be seen in this diagram, Pythagoras worked out in ancient times that using frets to change the string length into certain fractions of the full length, resulted in certain pleasant sounding musical notes. This is shown in the following diagram, along with other key string lengths that are created using the frets on a guitar. This is the fundamental mathematics of all stringed instruments which Pythagoras figured out. This means the musical note gets “twice as big”, making it become the same note, but one octave higher.įrequency (or how high the note pitch is) increases directly as the length of the string is decreased. The Inverse Proportion means that if we play 1/2 of the string, we get 2 times the frequency of vibration of the string. Positioning our finger at the 12th fret position, makes the string exactly half as long as its full length with no finger on any frets. This happens on a guitar when we play a note at the 12th fret. He found that mathematically, the note’s pitch is inversely proportional to the length of the string.įor example if we halve the length of the string, we create the exact same note, but one Octave higher. However, Pythagoras worked on a lot of other mathematical ideas, including working out how long guitar strings need to be to create certain notes. Pythagoras was a Greek Mathematician who is famous for his mathematical analysis of the lengths of the sides of right angled triangles. We use frets to play specific musical notes. Let’s start with the frets on the guitar neck. In this lesson we look at the mathematics associated with the guitar in rock music. What is really cool is all of the mathematics involved with this amazing instrument. Here at Passy’s World we love playing guitar. ![]() Sorry for being 'naïve' or just 'forgetting', but any assistance is greatly appreciated.Image Copyright 2012 by Passy’s World of Mathematics I'm a little confused as to how to go about it, or what formulae to use. Yet, it seems there must be some other way I can determine the figures that I want, no ?īut. Since these drawings/sketches come off a piece of machinery, let's just say it is 'not reasonably possible' for me to figure out the actual origin of the circle. I know there are formula's out there such as this.īut that requires you to know 'h' or how far the center of the circle is. ![]() So say I have this series of arcs/chords, and I am trying to determine the radius of the circle they are composed of. ![]() But I am trying to work on a little side project at the time, and rather than 'theoretical' this actually applies to a 'real world' type example: In any case, unfortunately my 'geometry' is maybe a little too far back and too fuzzy. Notably, this is not the only subject that has 'come back to bite me', or in undergrad studying first in Philosophy, I took a course on logic, where we learned about 'truth tables'- And lo-and-behold, some 15 years later I find in FPGA's and system state logic, what do you have, but 'truth tables !'. ![]() I have to admit upfront that while I did fine at high school Geometry, it probably remains one of the subjects where I thought, 'okay, when am I ever going to use this ?' And sort of blanked it out of my mind for direct reference. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |