If you shrunk a guitar down to 1 inch

It would of course no longer sound the same to you or I.

But what if one of us was also shrunk down to the same scale as the guitar (or harp or whatever stringed instrument), would it sound perfectly normal to the shrunk person but not to the normal size person?

 

No. Smaller bones, eardrums and hairs in the cochlea would respond to higher pitches and vibrate faster. This happens in females. They hear sounds higher than males do. It probably means that you can hear the higher pitches of the small guitar with better fidelity.

 

But what I'm really curious about, is the low pitch notes. Of course if you have a 1 inch guitar the low E string isn't going to sound rich and low at all, it'll be a little plink.

But if you were also shrunk down with that guitar to the same size, would the low E on the shrunken guitar sound deep, rich and bass-y to you? Think about like a bass guitar...would it still have super deep tones to you even though it would sound like tiny plinks to a normal ear?

And if not, why?



Trippy

 

The high pitched sounds of the shrunken guitar enter a shrunken person's ear. The components of a shrunken person's ear resonate with the high pitched sounds because they are smaller and can now respond to higher frequencies. The sound enters the ear, vibrates the shrunken eardrum, anvil, stirrup bones, etc, and causes fluid in the ear to vibrate the little hairs in the cochlea in the ear. All this happens at high frequency because the sound entering is at high frequency, and the components of the ear are small and respond to high frequency.

The hairs in the cochlea vibrate at high frequency, and therefore transmit high frequency signals to the brain via nerves. There is nothing in a shrunken ear, or any ear, that vibrates slowly when a high frequency sound comes in.

 

There are neurological disorders where the ability to distinquish tonality is lost. An occasional sufferer from this contition will be listening to music and the music will loose all of its tonal qualities, leaving only the rhythmic elements.

The ability to hear and distinuqish tone is a brain process, not an ear process.

Would the shrunken listener hear tones?
Yes their ears would perceive the atmospheric vibrations. The frequency response of a membrane (the ear drum) might react to size change differently that the frequency shift of a linear guitar string. But that's what tuning pegs are for.

How would those tones sound in comparison to the unshrunken state?
The brain has not been developed to process pitches in the tiny guitar frequency range. The newly tiny listener's brain will need to re-learn how to interpret those high frequency signals. It's unlikely that the newly tiny listener will perceive the newly tiny guitar sounds as music.

 

It would because time would be going slower and that would effectively stretch out the harmonic content of the vibrations to the same pitch as they were initially when both you and the guitar were the normal size. As you were shrunk down to the same size as the guitar, if you could somehow pluck the guitar at the same time, you would hear a doppler effect that that would span between two and a three octaves.

 

Yeah, it does seem like a relativity thing to me (even though I hardly understand the concept).



There may be something to this...or not. Sometimes I'm stupid like that.

 

Well, frequency perception first occurs in nerves in the inner ear, which respond to the movement of little hairs. Our ear has a hueg array of these hairs, each one being stimulated by sound of different wavelengths.

if you shrunk a guitar by 100 times, and shrunk a man by 100 times, the pitch should sound similar to that of the normal guitar to the normal man, because the relative size of the wavelength of the notes to the size of the hairs in the ear, is the same in both cases.
the tone would likely be different however, and this is all considering that an ear could even be replicated at that scale, in the human form.