Study on the Spectral and Acoustical Features of the Clarinet Sound Using Physical and Computational Analysis

Acoustically, the clarinet sound is not closely related to the sound generated by other woodwind instrument. In this paper, acoustics knowledge was used to carry out physical and spectral analysis. The wave forms and spectrums of the clarinet and a few other instruments were calculated to compare their sound properties.  The research implemented the sound of a clarinet instrument using harmonic equations and computer programs such as Mixcraft and MATLAB. The sound properties that were investigated were wavelength, fundamental frequency, harmonics, and trigonometric functions used in a Fourier transformation.

It was noticed that several instruments had much more energy in the second, and/or third harmonics than in the first frequency. Also, a certain instrument showed the purest tones until a certain frequency. After crossing the frequency threshold, the tone became fuzzy.

In the spectra analysis, we determined how the harmonics and power or energy of the clarinet were changed over time, but the pitch did not change. The main objective of this research was to study a musical note of the clarinet sound using digital audio workstation (DAW) and computational simulations.