The Science of a Guitar

Do you want to be a guitar hero? Just brush up on your "rock-it" science! Find out how your ears change music into a message your brain can understand. The Science of a Guitar fine-tunes the science of sound, from vibrations to volume and from sound waves to scales.

Children's Literature

"What makes an electric guitar different from an acoustic guitar? How do we even hear sound and how is it measured?" This book first explains the science behind how sound is created and then how the ears capture it. On page seventeen, a chart shows the softest sound of breathing at ten db to the loudest sound of a blue whale at 190 db. Decibels (db) measure the volume of sound. It continues on to say that permanent hearing loss happens at 100 db (if sustained for over one minute), so be cautious when listening to loud music. The guitar makes sound when the player plucks a string that creates a vibration that resonates inside the sound box and causes the air inside to vibrate, too. The guitar creates music which can have a low or high pitch depending upon how tight the strings are strung. The author explains a tough concept through the use of simple terms, diagrams, photographs, and scientific facts. The orange boxes give suggestions or challenge the reader to think while the green boxes give extra descriptions or add additional information. Bold faced print divides the sections and highlights the vocabulary words found in the glossary on pages thirty and thirty-one. The dynamic photographs throughout the book depict the range of musical instruments explored and how each works. At the back of the book, the reader will find the index, glossary, and how to learn more about sound. This book is part of "The Science of Sound" series. Reviewer: Julia Beiker