What do you think?
Rate this book
Music, Sound and Sensation: A Modern Exposition
Related closely to the field of physical acoustics is that of psychoacoustics, which deals with the phenomena of musical hearing from a psychological and aesthetic point of view. One of the major contributors to our understanding of the subject is Fritz Winckel. When this book first appeared in German in 1960, reviewers pressed for an English translation. This Dover volume is an answer to that it makes Professor "Winckel's important study generally available to English-language readers for the very first time." It has been extensively revised and updated by the author.
In his thought-provoking study, Professor Winckel applies the findings of technical researches in acoustics to the practice of music, covering many different aspects of recent psychoacoustical the evaluation of loudness and the dissolution power of the car; the influence of the acoustical properties of the concert hall on the hearing process; the function of time variation and rhythm in musical perception; the evaluation of the sound spectrum including the unharmonic components. He surveys extensively the German and English literature in the field, organizing his information into chapters on stationary sound, the onset behavior of sound, the concept of space, the concept of time, the evaluation of sound through the hearing mechanism, unclarity in musical structures, simultaneously sounding tones, electroacoustic sound structure, and the effect of music on the listener.
This book should prove equally useful to acousticians, sound engineers, and others working in this area of applied physics and to composers, performers, and musicologists concerned with the technical aspects of music. Psychologists working in the field of sense perception will also find much of value here.
New translation by Thomas Binkley of the 1960 German edition of Phänomene des musikalischen Hörens, with revisions and corrections by the author.
In his thought-provoking study, Professor Winckel applies the findings of technical researches in acoustics to the practice of music, covering many different aspects of recent psychoacoustical the evaluation of loudness and the dissolution power of the car; the influence of the acoustical properties of the concert hall on the hearing process; the function of time variation and rhythm in musical perception; the evaluation of the sound spectrum including the unharmonic components. He surveys extensively the German and English literature in the field, organizing his information into chapters on stationary sound, the onset behavior of sound, the concept of space, the concept of time, the evaluation of sound through the hearing mechanism, unclarity in musical structures, simultaneously sounding tones, electroacoustic sound structure, and the effect of music on the listener.
This book should prove equally useful to acousticians, sound engineers, and others working in this area of applied physics and to composers, performers, and musicologists concerned with the technical aspects of music. Psychologists working in the field of sense perception will also find much of value here.
New translation by Thomas Binkley of the 1960 German edition of Phänomene des musikalischen Hörens, with revisions and corrections by the author.
- GenresMusic
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
6 people are currently reading
35 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 19, 2020
An 1967 translation of a 1960 work on psychoacoustics and electronic ways of studying music, this text reads really antiquated, with the terminology (like "cps" being used for frequency instead of "Hz") and language requiring the reader to take some time to acclimate
As it stands though, in 172 pages this book still covers a significant amount of useful knowledge to anyone studying music or wanting to make music themselves, especially for those who use DAWs like myself
Of note are the following topics, which I'll just list here for my own sake so that I won't forget them
1. That the ear and the brain has a time constant of about 50 milliseconds, and that any sound that begins and ends within a time less than that is registered as nothing but a click
2. That a theoretical stationary sound can either be completely pure, but require an infinite amount of time to manifest, or happen in an instant, but be muddled and noisy. In the real world, all sounds exist between these two extremes of time and purity of tone, and is an acoustic version of the Uncertainty Principle.
This is a way more intuitive explanation than most other explanations of uncertainty principles in general and damn I'll be using this when explaining quantum physics yeet
3. That reverb is a decay of sound, and an echo is a repetition of sound
4. That you probably need much less reverb than you think you do, except if you purposefully wanna make things sound extremely faded or hazy
5. The parts of a waveform in order of identifiable information are the attack, the decay, the release, and the sustain
6. That the first two formants of a thing give it most of its character
7. That the 7th partial is a practical threshold for when something gains the full "characteristic" of a chord
8. That visual representations of sound are extremely useful (commonsense but yea)
9. That a combination of tones is more than the sum of its parts, especially when things like combination tones and beats and interference are considered
10. That trying to physically change the tone color of one (orchestral) instrument to sound like another is much harder than it first seems
11. That when a bunch of (orchestral) instruments all play a note at the same time, the way people can tell which instrument is which is through their onset time, or their attack
12. Volume affects tone color and perception of brightness. If a song is played loudly, it's perceived to be brighter than if it was played at a softer volume
13. Combination tones can create other combination tones, and on and on
gonna add to this list when I reread this maybe next year
As it stands though, in 172 pages this book still covers a significant amount of useful knowledge to anyone studying music or wanting to make music themselves, especially for those who use DAWs like myself
Of note are the following topics, which I'll just list here for my own sake so that I won't forget them
1. That the ear and the brain has a time constant of about 50 milliseconds, and that any sound that begins and ends within a time less than that is registered as nothing but a click
2. That a theoretical stationary sound can either be completely pure, but require an infinite amount of time to manifest, or happen in an instant, but be muddled and noisy. In the real world, all sounds exist between these two extremes of time and purity of tone, and is an acoustic version of the Uncertainty Principle.
This is a way more intuitive explanation than most other explanations of uncertainty principles in general and damn I'll be using this when explaining quantum physics yeet
3. That reverb is a decay of sound, and an echo is a repetition of sound
4. That you probably need much less reverb than you think you do, except if you purposefully wanna make things sound extremely faded or hazy
5. The parts of a waveform in order of identifiable information are the attack, the decay, the release, and the sustain
6. That the first two formants of a thing give it most of its character
7. That the 7th partial is a practical threshold for when something gains the full "characteristic" of a chord
8. That visual representations of sound are extremely useful (commonsense but yea)
9. That a combination of tones is more than the sum of its parts, especially when things like combination tones and beats and interference are considered
10. That trying to physically change the tone color of one (orchestral) instrument to sound like another is much harder than it first seems
11. That when a bunch of (orchestral) instruments all play a note at the same time, the way people can tell which instrument is which is through their onset time, or their attack
12. Volume affects tone color and perception of brightness. If a song is played loudly, it's perceived to be brighter than if it was played at a softer volume
13. Combination tones can create other combination tones, and on and on
gonna add to this list when I reread this maybe next year
September 8, 2018
most of the math was over my head, but in context, it was useful to see the ways sound is analyzed in this thorough study of psycho-acoustics (the study of how sound is received by the brain and our ears). i'm thankful for this, it stimulated a lot of thought to take back to the woodshed.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews