Starting in fourth grade and ending in tenth grade, I spent several days a week at our school’s concert band practice. I was a percussion player and that meant learning new and interesting instruments on a regular basis. I had grown up playing the piano which made me one of the few drummers who could quickly sight-read musical notes while playing mallet instruments like the marimba. The keys on a piano are very similar to most mallet percussion instruments.

When I moved on from middle school to high school I had the opportunity to play a new instrument, the timpani. These are very large drums that sit on the floor with the head of the drums at the height of most people’s waist. The drums are tuned using a pedal at their base. The pedal stretches the head of the drum and creates different sounds. The interesting part about tuning the timpani was matching the pitch of the drum to that of a specific note required for a song. While other instruments would be warming up for a song, I would be using a pitch pipe to dial in the notes required on each drum.

When I was matching the pitch of the drums to the pitch pipe, I was actually just comparing their perceived frequencies. Many people can relate to pitch: low frequency sounds have a low pitch and high frequency sounds high pitch. A low pitch would be the sound you hear from a large drum, while a higher pitch would be a note played on a flute. Playing around with the tension in the head of the drum changed the physical movement of the head when hit with a mallet, and that changed the pitch that I was hearing.

The actual movement  that takes place when a musician strikes a drum head is what creates a sound. The head moves up and down rapidly, creating changes in air pressure that follow a sinusoidal wave. This wave is commonly known as a sound wave. The frequency of the wave is perceived as pitch. The amplitude or intensity of the wave is perceived as loudness. A higher amplitude wave will produce a louder sound for the audience.

So it turns out that the entire time I was messing around with the tuning pedals on the timpani, I was really playing with the basic physics of creating sound.