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Measured Tones: The Interplay of Physics and Music
There has always been a close connection between physics and music. From the great days of ancient Greek science, ideas and speculations have passed backward and forward between natural philosophers (physicists) and musical theorists. Measured Tones: The Interplay of Physics and Music, Second Edition explores the story of that relationship in an entertaining and user-friendly way.
The book provides an easy-to-understand introduction to the physics involved in every stage of the music making process: from the very earliest experiments on vibrating strings and primitive sound makers to the latest concerns of digital sound recording, MP3 files, and information theory. At the same time, it examines the story of our developing concept of the universe we live in: from the ancient visions of a cosmos regulated by the music of the spheres to our current understanding of an expanding universe controlled by the laws of quantum mechanics and string theory. Running through all this is one recurring question - the so-called puzzle of consonance. Why do humans respond to music and musical sounds the way they do? It is the attempts by musicians and scientists through the ages to apply new knowledge to answer this question that gives this story its fascination.
Measured Tones should provide rewarding reading for any physics teacher or student who would like to know more about music and where it impinges on their subject as well as for anyone who is musically inclined.
The book provides an easy-to-understand introduction to the physics involved in every stage of the music making process: from the very earliest experiments on vibrating strings and primitive sound makers to the latest concerns of digital sound recording, MP3 files, and information theory. At the same time, it examines the story of our developing concept of the universe we live in: from the ancient visions of a cosmos regulated by the music of the spheres to our current understanding of an expanding universe controlled by the laws of quantum mechanics and string theory. Running through all this is one recurring question - the so-called puzzle of consonance. Why do humans respond to music and musical sounds the way they do? It is the attempts by musicians and scientists through the ages to apply new knowledge to answer this question that gives this story its fascination.
Measured Tones should provide rewarding reading for any physics teacher or student who would like to know more about music and where it impinges on their subject as well as for anyone who is musically inclined.
420 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1989
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 26, 2011
I have a solid science education but am semi-illiterate musically. This book explains the science behind music (and sometimes the music behind science), told as a history of the co-evolution of the two disciplines. Not only does it build a solid intuition for the how and why of musical physics, but it creates a fascination with the subject.
A few things that I learned from the book:
* How an opera singer can be heard over a whole orchestra
* How the acoustics of a theater work, and how a live audience can screw with them
* How standing waves can form in a pipe with open ends
* Why words are harder to understand the higher pitched singing becomes
* And so many other cool things.
I highly recommend this is you are curious at all about music.
A few things that I learned from the book:
* How an opera singer can be heard over a whole orchestra
* How the acoustics of a theater work, and how a live audience can screw with them
* How standing waves can form in a pipe with open ends
* Why words are harder to understand the higher pitched singing becomes
* And so many other cool things.
I highly recommend this is you are curious at all about music.
February 6, 2026
Measured Tones is a rare kind of book. It sits deliberately between disciplines and refuses to fully belong to any of them. It is at once a book about physics, the history of science, music theory, instruments, and audio, but it never collapses into a specialist treatment of any single field. That is both its risk and its strength.
Johnston starts from a deceptively simple question: what is sound? From there he traces how humans have tried to understand sound historically, from early ideas about pitch and harmony to wave theory and the physics of vibration. These developments are not presented as dry history, but as evolving attempts to make sense of something that is both physical and deeply musical. The result is a coherent narrative in which science, music, and listening are shown to be inseparable.
Along the way, Johnston explains how sound works in terms of frequency, amplitude, timbre, and resonance, and how different classes of instruments produce tone. These sections are not exhaustive surveys of instruments, but principled explanations. They give just enough detail to understand why strings, winds, and percussion behave as they do, and why their overtone structures matter musically. For musicians, this provides a theoretical grounding for things that are often learned intuitively or through experience alone.
One of the book’s great strengths is its treatment of tuning and temperament. The explanation of well-tempered tuning is among the clearest I have encountered. Johnston makes it obvious that temperament is not a solution but a compromise, a managed distribution of error that makes modulation possible. Once explained this way, many aspects of harmony and tonal music suddenly make sense.
The book assumes some basic literacy. You need to be comfortable with simple formulas at a high school level, not to calculate but to understand relationships. You also need a working familiarity with basic music theory such as scales, triads, chords, and modulation. Johnston does not teach these from scratch. He uses them as shared language.
This is also why the book risks falling between audiences. It is not technical enough for the physicist, not analytical enough for the musicologist, and not practical enough for the audio engineer looking for tools or measurements. But that in-between position is exactly where the book becomes valuable. It works best as a foundation and a springboard, not as an endpoint. It gives readers a framework that allows them to move more intelligently into any of those domains afterward.
Highly recommended
Johnston starts from a deceptively simple question: what is sound? From there he traces how humans have tried to understand sound historically, from early ideas about pitch and harmony to wave theory and the physics of vibration. These developments are not presented as dry history, but as evolving attempts to make sense of something that is both physical and deeply musical. The result is a coherent narrative in which science, music, and listening are shown to be inseparable.
Along the way, Johnston explains how sound works in terms of frequency, amplitude, timbre, and resonance, and how different classes of instruments produce tone. These sections are not exhaustive surveys of instruments, but principled explanations. They give just enough detail to understand why strings, winds, and percussion behave as they do, and why their overtone structures matter musically. For musicians, this provides a theoretical grounding for things that are often learned intuitively or through experience alone.
One of the book’s great strengths is its treatment of tuning and temperament. The explanation of well-tempered tuning is among the clearest I have encountered. Johnston makes it obvious that temperament is not a solution but a compromise, a managed distribution of error that makes modulation possible. Once explained this way, many aspects of harmony and tonal music suddenly make sense.
The book assumes some basic literacy. You need to be comfortable with simple formulas at a high school level, not to calculate but to understand relationships. You also need a working familiarity with basic music theory such as scales, triads, chords, and modulation. Johnston does not teach these from scratch. He uses them as shared language.
This is also why the book risks falling between audiences. It is not technical enough for the physicist, not analytical enough for the musicologist, and not practical enough for the audio engineer looking for tools or measurements. But that in-between position is exactly where the book becomes valuable. It works best as a foundation and a springboard, not as an endpoint. It gives readers a framework that allows them to move more intelligently into any of those domains afterward.
Highly recommended
November 3, 2012
This guy did a really good job of mixing history, physics, and music theory. It was very readable, and he warns you when he is going to explain more difficult physics concepts that you can skip if you want. And he did a better job at explaining vacuum tubes than my circuits teacher did :) I played in orchestra in high school. Now I understand band instruments much better. I don't know much about music theory, but I really enjoyed learning about it with the historical context provided.
September 14, 2009
Answered a few technical questions I've had about music but overall was mostly too simplistic or on occasion too complex.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews