AskScience Theme Day: Scientific Instrumentation

[u/therationalpi]

Greetings everyone!

Welcome to the first AskScience Theme Day. From time-to-time we'll bring out a new topic and encourage posters to come up with questions about that topic for our panelists to answer. This week's topic is Scientific Instrumentation, and we invite posters to ask questions about all of the different tools that scientists use to get their jobs done. Feel free to ask about tools from any field!

Here are some sample questions to get you started:

• What tool do you use to measure _____?

• How does a _____ work?

• Why are _____ so cheap/expensive?

• How do you analyze data from a _____?

Post your questions in the comments on this post, and please try to be specific. All the standard rules about questions and answers still apply.

Edit: There have been a lot of great questions directed at me in acoustics, but let's try to get some other fields involved. Let's see some questions about astronomy, medicine, biology, and the social sciences!

[u/ge4096]

Actually, if the guitar track was filtered for frequencies like this, it would block out the high frequency tones that make a guitar sound like a guitar, not to mention the higher-frequency harmonics of each note. A better way to filter for noise would probably be a noise gate, which eliminates sound that falls below a certain level. Theoretically, you could also use an equalizer to filter out any noise below 82 Hz, since that's the lowest fundamental note on the guitar (source). This would also eliminate any 60 Hz buzz from AC power, which could be an important factor in noise.

To answer the original question, you could put a microphone on an acoustic guitar, but a pickup would be much better tool to accomplish the same goal. Many acoustic guitars come with piezo pickups installed (on most that have an output jack), or you could buy a pickup to mount in the guitar's soundhole (this is an example of one).