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I wrote these notes a while back while studying instrument physics and music theory as a part of my training as a composer. They are broken into three main sections: intonation, which discusses tuning instruments and our modern 12-tone chromatic scale; harmonics, which discusses some detail of how exactly musical instruments produce the sounds they do; and timbre, which discusses why different instruments have different tone quality. I am not a physicist, so if you find any errors, let me know at drew@drewpendergrass.com.
I encourage you to download Audacity, an excellent and free audio recording and editing program, before you start this tutorial.
Unless otherwise noted, all images are created by myself and can be reused by anyone under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. The same goes for the text of the notes themselves.