As I teach Audacity classes at the Conservatory in my city, students always ask me about the frequencies of the most popular instruments such as keyboard, guitar, vocals, electric bass.
Can you let me know if there is a table or some teaching material that I can take advantage of and pass on to my students?
I understand that I will have the reference by the graphic equalizer.
For example: the electric bass is between the frequencies … and … The female vocal is between the frequencies … and…
This would be of great value when we want to attenuate the frequency of some instrument or voice.
You can also find note-charts for the various vocal ranges, and you can look-up the associated frequencies.
But… All instruments have harmonics & overtones (that’s why a piano sounds different from a trumpet playing the same note). And when you consider the harmonics most instruments (and voices) cover most of the audio range so there is a lot of overlap.
…If you have a male & female singing a duet you can’t filter-out the male or female voice but you might be able to enhance or diminish one or the other to some extent.
This is a common misconception. Even though you’re singing one note, your voice is producing a ton of other tones at the same time. It’s those other tones that make people pay to hear you, or tell you to shut up so you don’t scare the horses.
This is one piano note. G1 which is G way over on the left. The note I’m playing is that one tall spike. Doubling the frequency (along the bottom) is where the octaves live.
The rest of those spikes are the overtones and harmonics (from Steve above). Those are what let you hear who made the piano. Real pianos have three strings per note for most of the range and you have to tune (stretch or relax) each and every one so they match for good musical performance. I still have my tuning hammer and other tools in a box in the garage.
This is the display for G1 and G2 an octave higher played at the same time.
So now we got two tall spikes near the middle and two collections of overtones and harmonics.
This is a male announcing voice submitted a while ago.
If you also analyze someone else speaking the same words, you will get a similar purple collection. Human hearing in general goes from 20Hz on the left (thunder, earthquakes) to 20000Hz (sizzling sounds only the dog can hear) on the right. Most voices contain a lot of the same tones in different proportions.
Your head and ears can tell what’s going on, but trying to get a computer to deal with that is just now becoming available through artificial intelligence.
