Introduction to sound: Acoustics for the hearing and speech sciences: By Charles E. Speaks. Chapman & Hall. ISBN 0 412 48760 8. Price: £18.95
✍ Scribed by Maryanne Tate
- Book ID
- 102630937
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1993
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 108 KB
- Volume
- 39
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0003-682X
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In his preface to 'Introduction to Sound', Charles Speaks states that 'this book was written to teach the fundamental concepts of acoustics'. He places particular emphasis on the word 'teach', but within the UK at least, it seems unlikely to fulfil this role.
In an attempt to make the book suitable for the UK market the author has tried to use two, and sometimes three systems of units of measurement. This tends to impair readability, due to the excessive use of parentheses. Professor Speaks would have been well advised to adopt the S.I. system exclusively rather than refer to the MKS, cgs and English system. In a similar vein, some of the symbols used are not those in common usage in most scientific texts, for example the use of 'Nt' as the abbreviation for newtons. This combination of unusual abbreviation and variety of units will serve only to confuse those less adept at physics or mathematics.
Chapter 3, which is entitled 'Logarithms and Antilogarithms', sits uneasily with the rest of the text. Whilst it is clear that any book on sound must attempt to give a basic grounding in logarithmic scales, this would perhaps have been better placed as an appendix. The later chapters discuss waveforms, resonance and filtering, distortion, and sound transmission. These provide adequate coverage of the subject matter, and the use of worked examples and practice problems is helpful. The text is supplemented by a considerable number of illustrations, diagrams and tables, some of which are either unnecessary or confusing. The appendix of essential equations is valuable but it is unfortunate that the author did not make use of more up-to-date references---only one being later than 1977.
Whilst of general interest, this book does not lend itself to being a course text within the UK. The mixture of units and the use of nonstandard symbols and terminology will tend to confuse the uninitiated.