Re: How do I make/calibrate a xylophone to play 8 notes chords?

Hi Courtney,

That's a great project! The physics of music is a complicated (but fascinating) field and if you're interested in finding out more about the theory of music, you can find plenty of answers on the MadSci network (including one of my old ones) and also on the web. Just go to your favourite search engine (either on MadSci or on the wild, wild web) and search for "+music +physics" and you should get plenty of links (in fact, I found all the links below within the first 2 pages returned by that particular search on Yahoo).

But, I think your question is aimed more towards the engineering aspects of this. With regards to the actual mechanics or engineering of building a xylophone, you can get great directions in a couple of books. I found one at our local library that had really detailed directions for building both wooden and metal xylophones. The name of the book is: Making Simple Musical Instruments by Hopkin and Morgenthal. You can also check out Making Gourd Musical Instruments by Summit and Widess. Besides the books, there's a web page maintained by Rosalyn Winston that discusses how to build a xylophone. Finally, there's a page at Blue's Clues that gives the details of how to build a water xylophone (which is actually considerably easier to build than a wooden or metal xylophone)!

In addition, there is a great web page that discusses the mechanics of how to calibrate it, how to tune it and adjust it's pitch, etc. It also discusses the basic physics of what pitch, loudness, etc. are. And it's got tons of links and reference documents. It's called The Physics of Xylophones and is hosted on GeoCities so if the link is dead, you can email the author at kviney@bu.edu. Well, I hope that helps... if none of these leads pan out, drop me a line and I'll forward you the directions from the book at my local library.

Best of luck,


Rick.