Instruments and acoustics

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (a staff score with English lyrics)

An ordinary score: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star in C major, 4/4, on three staves, with Jane Taylor's 1806 words under the notes. Each syllable is centred on its notehead, ignoring trailing punctuation, and a hyphen sits midway inside Twin-kle and dia-mond. Staff lines, stems and barlines follow the SMuFL engraving defaults; the clef is one smooth curve.

This drawing comes from one YAML file. No shape was moved by hand.

Notes in the source (in Japanese)

Source (YAML)

examples/gallery/403-きらきら星-英語の歌詞つきの五線譜.zumen.yaml

More in this field

• Guitar frets are a geometric series, and the saddle must still be moved back to play in tune
• Hall acoustics: delay is nothing but a difference in path length — one millisecond is 0.34 m
• A piano action: the jack lets go just before the string, so nothing is pushing the hammer at impact
• Music engraving: the staff space is the unit for every measurement, and the stem is 3.5 of them
• Frets crowd together as you climb because what is divided into twelve is not a distance but a ratio: each semitone multiplies by 2^(1/12), so the twelfth fret lands at exactly half the string and everything beyond it repeats at half size
• The black keys are grouped in twos and threes so that a hand can find its place without looking — twelve evenly spaced keys would give no landmark at all — and 88 turns out to be seven octaves plus four: three keys added below and one above
• The strings run left to right from high to low and the louder the instrument the further back it sits, so the seating plan is itself a balance control — and "double wind" or "triple wind" names the size of the orchestra by counting only the woodwind
• A polar plot of how much a microphone picks up from each direction. The three familiar shapes are not separate inventions but one formula at its ends and middle — omnidirectional, cardioid and figure-of-eight are A = 1, 0.5 and 0 in r = A + (1 - A)cos θ. Solving the same formula gives the dead angles: 180 degrees for a cardioid, 90 and 270 for a figure-of-eight.