You are starting the final unit of this course!

The topic is standing waves that you have been seeing and hearing a lot in this course; which finally brings us to the physics of the guitar strings . Most instruments rely on producing sound at fixed frequency, depending on the length of the standing wave.

In a guitar, for example, this is achieved by pressing down the string onto a piece of metal at a fixed distance from the bottom of the guitar. The smaller node-to-node distance results in a higher frequency, as you will learn in this unit. But standing waves are not just apparent in music. In fact, a large part of the modern theory of quantum mechanics involves standing waves!

Image by Daniel Kirsch from Pixabay is licensed under CC0