Quantifying the Effects of Temperature and Relative Humidity on Violin Pitch

Overview

Objectives/Goals I play violin. I noticed my violin sounded somewhat different and became out of tune more easily when the weather was warm and dry. I decided to try to verify this effect. My project attempted to study the effects of temperature and relative humidity on the pitch of a violin. Methods/Materials A built-in microphone on a laptop and a spectrum analysis program OscilloMeter were used to record spectra of violin sound and measure peak positions of the fundamental and harmonic frequencies of the violin. A heater and a humidifier were used to change the temperature and humidity under which the violin was tested. I measured the fundamental frequencies of all four strings in both control and manipulated environments. I recorded results. To reduce error, I repeated the same measurements several times and calculated the mean values. I performed 160 tests in four test environments. I changed the experimental environments by turning on a heater or a humidifier in both a large and a small room for 60 minutes. Each time, I moved the violin into the experimental environment and left it there for 30 minutes before testing. I then repeated the measurement procedures. I compared the results of each string#s fundamental frequency in the control room to the results recorded in the various experimental environments. I repeated my entire procedures using another violin to see if it exhibited similar changes in pitch. Results My results suggested that the pitch of a violin does change according to the temperature and humidity and that violins exhibit greater sensitivity to the temperature than humidity. Conclusions/Discussion When the temperature increased, the violin pitch shifted to lower frequencies. As the humidity decreased, the frequency of most strings also decreased. A thin string was more sensitive to the environment than a thicker string. In addition, strings played under conditions of high relative humidity produced less undesirable noise than strings played under the condition of low relative humidity.

Awards (1)

• Honorable Mention

Competition history

• CSEF 2009 Applied Mechanics & Structures · Entry J0202

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

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

Browse more like this

• All Engineering projects
• CSEF Engineering projects
• Every CSEF 2009 project