"Version: 20240401"--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references.

part I. Introduction. 1. Introduction -- 1.1. The scientific method -- 1.2. Units -- 1.3. The International System of Units (SI units) -- 1.4. A few important concepts -- 1.5. A quick review of vector and scalar quantities -- 1.6. Distance versus displacement -- 1.7. Speed versus velocity -- 1.8. Graphical representation of motion

2. Sound, music, and noise -- 2.1. What makes a sound either music or noise? -- 2.2. Some history of the science of sound -- 2.3. How does it all work? -- 2.4. The properties of traveling waves -- 2.5. What is sound?

3. Music, history, and culture -- 3.1. Music and life -- 3.2. Historic eras of music -- 3.3. Music and religion -- 3.4. Classes of musical instruments

part II. Sound production. 4. Tension and deformations in a string -- 4.1. Energy and force -- 4.2. Historic ideas about motion -- 4.3. Newton's laws of dynamics -- 4.4. Categories of forces -- 4.5. Mass versus weight -- 4.6. Tension

5. Vibrating systems -- 5.1. Simple harmonic motion -- 5.2. Standing waves -- 5.3. The reflection of waves -- 5.4. Waves in stringed instruments -- 5.5. Wave interaction : superposition and interference

6. Damping and resonance in musical instruments -- 6.1. Damping in oscillators -- 6.2. Resonance -- 6.3. Ways to drive a string at one of its resonances -- 6.4. Understanding resonance -- 6.5. Sympathetic vibrations -- 6.6. Resonances in musical instruments

part III. Sound propagation. 7. Sound propagation -- 7.1. Traveling waves -- 7.2. Periodic waves -- 7.3. The speed of sound waves -- 7.4. Sound absorption

8. Factors that impact sound propagation -- 8.1. Huygen's principle -- 8.2. The refraction of waves -- 8.3. Diffraction -- 8.4. The Doppler effect

part IV. Sound reception. 9. Sound power and sound intensity -- 9.1. Power and pressure -- 9.2. Sound waves -- 9.3. The intensity of sound waves (I) -- 9.4. Decibels -- 9.5. The speed of sound versus particle velocity -- 9.6. Sound power (W) -- 9.7. Sound pressure level (dB SPL) -- 9.8. Summary -- 9.9. The sound power level (dB SWL) -- 9.10. Loudness and loudness level

10. The human factor -- 10.1. The ranges of human hearing and sight -- 10.2. Speech production in humans -- 10.3. Auditory systems -- 10.4. Critical bands -- 10.5. Bone conduction

11. Psychoacoustics -- 11.1. Hearing in humans -- 11.2. The effect of noise on humans -- 11.3. Noise control

12. The acoustics of rooms -- 12.1. Sound propagation -- 12.2. The precedence effect -- 12.3. Room acoustics -- 12.4. Problems in acoustical design -- 12.5. The criteria for good acoustics -- 12.6. Designing spaces -- 12.7. Loudspeakers -- 12.8. Outdoor sound systems

part V. Of sound and music. 13. Musical tones, pitch, timbre, and vibrato -- 13.1. Musical tones and pitch -- 13.2. Pitch perception theories -- 13.3. Vibrato -- 13.4. The just-noticeable difference (JND) -- 13.5. Timbre or tone quality

14. A musician's graph paper and musical scales -- 14.1. Logarithms -- 14.2. The musical stave or staff -- 14.3. Musical scales -- 14.4. Musical intervals -- 14.5. Various terms that are important to know

part VI. Musical instruments. 15. Stringed instruments -- 15.1. The history of stringed instruments -- 15.2. The introduction of energy into a string instrument -- 15.3. Tuning -- 15.4. The guitar -- 15.5. The piano -- 15.6. Bowed stringed instruments

16. Percussion instruments -- 16.1. Rhythms in everyday life -- 16.2. Various percussion instruments -- 16.3. Vibrations in a bar -- 16.4. Vibrations in plates and membranes -- 16.5. Membranophones -- 16.6. Bells

17. Wind instruments -- 17.1. Wind instruments -- 17.2. The instruments of the woodwind family -- 17.3. The pipe organ -- 17.4. The instruments of the brass family -- 17.5. The bagpipe

part VII. Appendix. Appendix A. Review of mathematics -- Appendix B. Unit conversions -- Appendix C. Logarithms.

Full-text restricted to subscribers or individual document purchasers.

This first volume of The Physics of Sound and Music: A complete course text is a textbook providing a complete resource to accompany undergraduate courses on the physics of sound and music, and is supplemented by the lab manual in volume two of this two-volume set. This textbook is written in an accessible, clear and conversational style with the intent of engaging students and teaching physics without appearing overwhelming. The book starts with an introduction to sound and music, then discusses various aspects of sound, from how it is produced to how it propagates and how we hear it. The remainder of the book focuses on the various aspects of music, from musical tones to musical instruments, and concludes with a discussion of how sound can be recorded for replay. Problems and solutions are provided in each chapter.

This is a core text for one-semester, undergraduate (100-level) courses on the physics of sound or music. It will be particularly useful for courses aimed at non-physics majors with little experience of algebra or calculus.

Also available in print.

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader, EPUB reader, or Kindle reader.

Samya Zain is a Professor of Physics at Susquehanna University, USA, where she was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2016. She has been a member of the BaBar scientific research collaboration at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) at Stanford University, California, and the ATLAS collaboration at CERN, Geneva. Her previous books Techniques of Classical Mechanics: From Lagrangian to Newtonian Mechanics and Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics: An Introduction for Physicists and Engineers were published by IOP Publishing in 2019 and 2021, respectively.

Title from PDF title page (viewed on May 1, 2024).