Frequency Analysis of Plucked Musical Instruments-The Surprising Case of Suppressed Fundamental

Human mind recognizes a veritable number of instruments by their sound alone regardless the pitch and volume of the sound being played. Understanding musical timbre is a challenge to composers, engineers, perceptual psychologists alike. Timbre is caused by the fact that each note from a musical instrument is a complex tone containing more than one frequency, has many modes of vibration occurring simultaneously with the vibration and that which has slowest vibration is called the “Fundamental”. We have recorded sounds of various musical instruments, and performed their frequency analysis whereby we observed a very peculiar phenomenon of “Suppressed Fundamental” found in low frequencies of certain plucked string musical instruments. We tried to mathematically model the phenomenon, and have performed numerical experiments to gain insights into the model and its relationship with the real world data we had acquired.