On Apr 11, 2006, at 2:04 PM, Anthony Lapinski wrote:
3) All musical instruments produce overtones (harmonics) except tuning
forks and some electronic pianos. How can the human vocal chords produce
pure tones? Living things are both delicate and complex, yet it is easy to
sing into a microphone and see a nice sine wave on an oscilloscope.
If you are a Mac user, I highly recommend the program AudioXplorer,
which I use extensively in my acoustics class. You can sing or play an
instrument and see a realtime FFT of the harmonic spectrum.