Does the Bow Tension Affect the Volume of the Sound Produced on a Violin?

Overview

Objectives/Goals The volume of a violin is an important quality that affects the way music is perceived by the audience. This experiment aimed to find how the tension of the violin bow affects the volume of the sound produced on a full (4/4) size violin. Methods/Materials First, the violin and bow were tuned and set up for the experiment. The bow was adjusted to various tensions (independent variable), and played on the violin while the volume of the sound (dependent variable) was measured. The tension was indirectly measured using vector summation. The volume was then measured for 4 trials on the A string of the violin and the results were recorded. Included in the materials were a full size violin and bow, violin shoulder rest, tuner, scale, tape, ruler, table, decibel sound meter (dBZ), and a piece of string. Results The lowest bow tension (23 14/41) yielded the lowest volume, while the highest bow tension (116 17/24) yielded the highest volume. The data shows the tendency of increased volume with increased bow tension. Conclusions/Discussion Results supported the hypothesis that the volume would increase as the tension increased. As the tension increased by ~400%, the volume in sound power increased by ~57%. This is most likely due to an increase in friction between the bow and the string causing an increase in the amplitude of the sound wave. The result also shows that the testing environment, including the temperature and humidity, can have a significant impact on the measurements.

Competition history

• CSEF 2018 Physics & Astronomy · Entry J1811

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Physics and Astronomy projects
• CSEF Physics and Astronomy projects
• Every CSEF 2018 project