Chemistry is of enormous importance in everyday life: almost everything that exists, and all that we see, make and eat is composed of molecules. The unravelling of molecular structure is a key activity of chemists. In these three video tracks, Dr Mike Bullivant looks briefly at three of the spectroscopic techniques that are used to determine the structure of chemical compounds - infrared spectroscopy, proton (1H) and 13C nuclear magnetic resonance (nmr) spectroscopy, and mass spectrometry. This material is taken from The Open University course S205 The molecular world.