"Acoustics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Rome, where Giovanni de' Medici had been elected Pope under the title of Leo X. He did not, however, work for the Pope, although he resided in the Vatican, his time being occupied in studying acoustics, anatomy, optics, geology, minerals, engineering, ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... vocal mechanism on the part of scientific students of the subject. The anatomy and physiology of the vocal organs have been exhaustively studied by a vast number of highly trained experts. So far as the muscular operations of tone-production are concerned, and the laws of acoustics bearing on the vocal action, no new discovery can well be expected. But in this very fact, the exhaustive attention paid to the mechanical operations of the voice, is seen the incompleteness of Vocal Science. Attention has ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... along to noontime. Ere noontime came I was consumed with gnawing pains of emptiness. As nearly as I might judge, I contained naught save vast hollow spaces and acoustics and vacuums and empty, echoing, neglected convolutions. Sorely was I tempted to relax the rigors of the just-inaugurated regime; nobly, though, I ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... being "a savage, a stranger to every sentiment of humanity." The great Diderot, in a book called "The Nephew of Rameau," referred caustically to Rameau's experiments and theories in acoustics, and added: ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... Professor Tyndall (1820-1893): a distinguished British physicist and member of the Royal Society. He explored with Huxley the glaciers of Switzerland. His work in electricity, radiant heat, light and acoustics gave him a ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the stage-manager, bellowing from the prompt-box, urged Henry to desist. It is one of the mysteries of behind-the-scenes acoustics that a whisper from any minor member of the company can be heard all over the house, while the stage-manager can burst himself without ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... better than mine. Every syllable they utter will have to dominate the entire auditorium. That is something that the coach must understand. When the house is full, the audience makes a difference in the acoustics. Your people in the show don't know anything about that, and so you must govern the volume of the dialogue and set every inflection, attitude of the body, and gesture definitely. But never let them ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... the questions, 'What is light?' and 'What is heat?' have occurred to the minds of men; but these questions never would have been answered had they not been preceded by the question, 'What is sound?' Amid the grosser phenomena of acoustics the mind was first disciplined, conceptions being thus obtained from direct observation, which were afterwards applied to phenomena of a character far too subtle to be observed directly. Sound we know to be due to vibratory motion. A vibrating tuning-fork, for ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... covers an ever wider field. When Mr. Hadow says that the terms concord and discord are wholly relative to the ear of the listener, and that the distinction between them is not to be explained on any mathematical basis, or by any a priori law of acoustics,—that it is not because a minor second is ugly that we dislike it, for it will be a concord some day,—he is only partly right. The minor second may be a "concord," that is, we may like it, some day; but that will be because w have extended our feeling ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... scented stillness of the room: they seemed out of harmony with its setting of afternoon intimacy, the kind of intimacy on which at any moment, a visitor might intrude without perceptibly lowering the atmosphere. It was as though a grand opera-singer had strained the acoustics of a ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... the other machine exactly the same sound. It was no more than the gentle TWANG of a clock-spring; but it was the first time in the history of the world that a complete sound had been carried along a wire, reproduced perfectly at the other end, and heard by an expert in acoustics. ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... REGISTER AND ALMANACK for 1851, with an ample Collection of Useful Statistical and Miscellaneous Tables, Facts, and Formulae, in Acoustics, Aerial Phenomena, Agriculture, Anatomy, Architecture, Astronomy, Chemistry, Gardening, Geography, Geology, Hydraulics, Mechanics, Optics, &c. &c., with a complete Index. Dedicated, by special Permission, ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... a quantity of curious things happened, which Wilhelm so far had not observed in spite of his studies in natural science. He could not touch his dinner, and Herr and Frau Ellrich's voices, against all the laws of acoustics, seemed to come from the far distance, and several minutes elapsed before the sounds reached his ears, although he sat close to the speakers. The waiters and hotel guests looked odd, and seemed to swim in a kind of rosy twilight. In the sky there seemed to be three ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... while, to complete the elocutionary duet, all the American women are simultaneously indulging the unruly and unbridled member. What the precise effect will be we don't profess to say; but we confidently predict some valuable discovery in the science of acoustics. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... employ to its full extent the art of the mime in conjunction with spoken speech would be absurd. The light and shade in the speech of the most "natural" actor—say, Mr Charles Hawtrey—is violently exaggerated on account of the peculiar acoustics of the theatre; amongst other things, the player has to address those far off in the galleries as well as those close to in the stalls, and therefore his work requires a series of compromises like that of a piano-tuner anxious to avoid "wolves" or a politician eager ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... said the Takur, "you will see what deep knowledge of all the laws of acoustics was in the possession of the fakirs. They enlarged the holes made by the beetle according to the size of the reed, sometimes shaping it into a circle, sometimes into an oval. These reeds in their present state can be justly considered as the finest illustration ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... "by what simple means I can prove the most important propositions. Acoustics thus can show me the analogous effects of sound on every object of its impact. All harmonies start from a common centre and preserve the closest relations among themselves; or rather, harmony, like light, is decomposable by our art as a ray is by ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... position was quite an unusual one; it brought the tail of the piano nearer to the audience, and gave a better view of the keyboard to the occupants of the seats in the orchestra behind the platform. 'It's a question of the acoustics, that's what it is,' observed a man near me, and a ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... knows as much about Norwich and its festivals as any one, is quite unable to throw any light on this mystic remark. There were complaints about the acoustics of the St. Andrew's Hall many years ago, but there appears to be no historic foundation for Dickens' reference. It would certainly be interesting to know what suggested ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... few stars being visible, we had little to say, but sat absorbed in thought, or in silence listened to the monotonous sound of our oars, a sort of rudimental music, suitable for the ear of Night and the acoustics ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... reasoning; whereby multitudes of truths, already known by induction from as many different sets of experiments, have come to be exhibited as deductions or corollaries from inductive propositions of a simpler and more universal character. Thus mechanics, hydrostatics, optics, acoustics, thermology, have successively been rendered mathematical; and astronomy was brought by Newton within the laws of general mechanics. Why it is that the substitution of this circuitous mode of proceeding for a process apparently ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Hardness. Alloys. Resistance. Persistence. Conductivity. Equalization. Reciprocity. Molecular Forces. Attraction. Cohesion. Adhesion. Affinity. Porosity. Compressibility. Elasticity. Inertia. Momentum. Weight. Centripetal Force. Centrifugal Force. Capillary Attraction. The Sap of Trees. Sound. Acoustics. Sound Mediums. Vibration. Velocity of Sound. Sound Reflections. Resonance. Echos. Speaking Trumpet. The Stethoscope. The Vitascope. The Phonautograph. The Phonograph. Light. The Corpuscular Theory. Undulatory Theory. Luminous ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... suddenly jarred when the wife in the corner, rocking the cradle with one foot while she turned a hoe-cake baking on the hearth with a dextrous flip of a knife, and feeling secure in his deafness, cast a witty fling at his fastidious apparel. With that frequent yet unexplained phenomenon of acoustics, her voice was so strung that its vibrations reached his numb perceptions as duly as if intended for his ears. He made no sign, in his pride and politeness, both indigenous. But he said to himself, "I don't laugh at her ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... previous to the day, Dr. Themison accompanied the amateurs by rail to Wrensham, to hear 'trial of the acoustics' of the Concert-hall. They were a goodly company; and there was fun in the railway-carriage over Colney's description of Fashionable London's vast octopus Malady-monster, who was letting the doctor fly to the tether of its longest filament for an hour, plying suckers ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is on the next deck and like our cabins shows signs of hasty construction; the soundproofing is there but the acoustics are kind of muffled and the generator is not boxed in but has cables trailing all over, and the fastenings have a strong ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... of the pump and hence a profound practical knowledge of the laws of pneumatics and hydrostatics), digests, oxygenises its blood—millions of years before any one had discovered oxygen—sees and hears, operations that involve an unconscious knowledge of the facts concerning optics and acoustics compared with which the conscious discoveries of Newton are insignificant—shall we say that a baby can do all these things at once, doing them so well and so regularly without being even able to give them attention, and yet without mistake, and shall ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... communicated to a wider elastic surface, the sound-board, which, by accumulated energy and broader contact with the air, re-enforces the strings' feeble sound. The properties of a string set in periodic vibration are the best known of the phenomena appertaining to acoustics. The molecules composing the string are disturbed in the string's vibrating length by the means used to excite the sound, and run off into sections, the comparative length and number of which depend partly upon the place in the string the excitement starts from; ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... virtuous from the vicious. He was much devoted to the study of natural philosophy; and, among other things, had undertaken to oblige the world with precepts on the sense of smelling, like those we have on optics and acoustics, by distributing into certain classes a great number of smells, to all of which he had given names; but an untimely death cut him off in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... Debate, which was reached by the aid of one of the numerous electric elevators. The Great Hall had an auditorium of one hundred feet in height and a seating capacity fully capable of accommodating the visiting multitudes. The acoustics were so perfect that one, at the farther end of the room, could easily hear the speaker on the stage. When Mr. World and his friend had entered the hall they were surprised to learn that many of the ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... discovered that an electric current had the power of transmitting sound over a copper wire knew very little about electricity. Had he known more about this agency and less about acoustics, Bell once said himself, he would never have invented the telephone. His father and grandfather had been teachers of the deaf and dumb and had made important researches in acoustics. Alexander Graham Bell, born in Edinburgh in March, ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... seemed the more annoying because there were few people in the restaurant to drown with chatter the sound of those two voices and because, in spite of their guarded tones, their table was one so situated that some freak of acoustics carried every syllable uttered at it, even though whispered, to the quick ears at the cashier's desk. A circumstance which had treated Sofia to many a moment of covert entertainment and not a few that threatened to shatter what slender illusions ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... their real idea, is that movement is presented to us as the true outer and explanatory cause of our sensations, the external excitement to our nerves. The most elementary works on physics are impregnated with this disconcerting conception. If we open a description of acoustics, we read that sound and noise are subjective states which have no reality outside our auditory apparatus; that they are sensations produced by an external cause, which is the vibratory movement of sonorous bodies—whence the conclusion that this vibratory ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... outlines of celestial architecture. In physics, the decomposition of light and the principles of optics discovered by Newton, the velocity of sound, the form of its undulations, and from Sauveur to Chladni, from Newton to Bernouilli and Lagrange, the experimental laws and leading theorems of Acoustics, the primary laws of the radiation of heat by Newton, Kraft and Lambert, the theory of latent heat by Black, the proportions of caloric by Lavoisier and Laplace, the first true conceptions of the source of fire and heat, the experiments, laws, and means by which Dufay, Nollet, Franklin, and especially ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... martial music, the "Internationale" and the "Star-Spangled Banner," each seemingly trying to drown the other in a Goetterdaemmerung of acoustics. ...
— Summit • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... though always remaining inductive, tends to become also deductive, and, to the same extent, to cease to be one of the experimental sciences, in which, as still in chemistry, though no longer in mechanics, optics, hydrostatics, acoustics, thermology, and astronomy, each generalisation rests on a special induction, and the reasonings consist but ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... chamber seventy feet across and seventy-five feet high, with a beautiful groined roof. Corridors adorned with frescoes stretch north and south from this Central Hall to the House of Commons and the House of Peers. The former is sixty-two feet long, and constructed with especial attention to acoustics, but it only has seats for a little over two-thirds of the membership of the House, and the others must manage as they can. The Speaker's chair is at the north end, and the ministers sit on his right hand and the opposition ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... account, however. Although the first performance on 26th December drew a large audience, it brought me in nothing but outrageously heavy expenses and great distress at the dismal effect of the orchestra owing to the bad acoustics. In spite of the dark outlook I decided to bear the cost of building a sound-screen, in order to enhance the effect of the two following concerts, when I flattered myself I might count on the success of the efforts ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... majestically with the Fraser County delegation, tested the acoustics of the hall at the first opportunity. While the chairman of the state central committee was endeavoring to present as the temporary chairman of the convention a patriot known as the "War Eagle of the Wabash," the gentleman from Fraser ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... general and applied physics comprises hydrostatics and heat (Prof. Dommer), electricity and magnetism (Prof. Hospitalier), and optics and acoustics (Prof. Baille). Lectures on general chemistry are delivered by Profs. Schultzenberger and Henninger, on analytical chemistry by Prof. Silva, on chemistry applied to the industries by Prof. Henninger (for inorganic) and Prof. Schultzenberger (for organic). The lectures ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... spoil." A rude drum and a monotonous chant, consisting only of the fundamental note and minor third, are the only things in the way of music among the more remote settlements of which I have any knowledge. Mrs. Micawber's singing has been described as the table-beer of acoustics. Eskimo singing is something more. The beer has become flat by the addition of ice. One of our engineers, who is quite a fiddler, experimented on his instrument with a view to seeing what effect music ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... at page 12. of Warner's edition of Godfrey Weber's Theory of Musical Composition:—"Since 1824 we have been laid under great obligations to our distinguished mathematician and writer on acoustics, Professor W. Weber, for most interesting developments on all these points, which he has arranged into an article in the journal Ccilia, vol. xii., expressly for musicians and musical ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... schools of music, one at Mannheim, one at Stockholm, and one at Darmstadt. He was especially noted for his organ recitals, as many as 7000 tickets having been sold for a single recital in Amsterdam. In 1798 it was said that he had then given over a thousand organ concerts. His knowledge of acoustics and his consequent skill in combining the stops enabled him to bring much power and variety from organs with fewer pipes than were generally considered necessary. The remodeling and simplification of organs was one of his most eagerly pursued activities. He not only rearranged ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... — N. sound, noise, strain; accent, twang, intonation, tone; cadence; sonorousness &c. adj.; audibility; resonance &c. 408; voice &c. 580; aspirate; ideophone[obs3]; rough breathing. [Science, of sound] acoustics; phonics, phonetics, phonology, phonography[obs3]; diacoustics[obs3], diaphonics[obs3]; phonetism[obs3]. V. produce sound; sound, make a noise; give out sound, emit sound; resound &c. 408. Adj. sounding; soniferous[obs3]; sonorous, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... hell beneath, these are thoughts which have consequences. Instead of the old deductive method, that of the mediaeval Aristotelianism, which had been worse than fruitless in the study of nature, men now set out with a great enthusiasm to study facts, and to observe their laws. Modern optics, acoustics, chemistry, geology, zoology, psychology and medicine, took their rises within the period of which we speak. The influence was indescribable. Newton might maintain his own simple piety side by side, so to say, with his character, as a scientific man, though even he did not escape ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... corner struck up "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here!" which echoed over to them in wild muddled acoustics, and then the lights suddenly went out; silence seemed to flow down the icy sides and sweep over them. Sally Carrol could still see her white breath in the darkness, and a dim row of pale faces over on ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... address, delivered from the proscenium box of the Calisthenic Lyceum by a notable financier on obligatory hydropathy, as accessory to the irrevocable and irreparable doctrine of evolution, which had been vehemently panegyrized by a splenetic professor of acoustics, and simultaneously denounced by a complaisant opponent as an undemonstrated romance of the last decade, amenable to no reasoning, however allopathic, outside of ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... profound practical knowledge of the laws of pneumatics and hydrostatics), digests, oxygenises its blood (millions of years before Sir Humphry Davy discovered oxygen), sees and hears—all most difficult and complicated operations, involving an unconscious knowledge of the facts concerning optics and acoustics, compared with which the conscious discoveries of Newton sink into utter insignificance? Shall we say that a baby can do all these things at once, doing them so well and so regularly, without being even able ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... been established. Enthusiastic inventors yet sucked their fingers in garrets, waiting for the good time coming; and philanthropic statesmen aired their vocabularies in vain, in Congressional halls, built in defiance of acoustics. Their words rose, their fine sentiments curled up and down the pillars of the temple of eloquence, and fell flat to the floor. Meanwhile human nature travelled by stage-coaches; and postage for over a hundred ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Archimedean screw set obliquely in a tank of water in such a way that its lower end is completely and its upper end partially immersed, and operated by being rotated in the opposite direction to that required for raising water. In acoustics he invented, about 1819, the improved siren which is known by his name, using it for ascertaining the number of vibrations corresponding to a sound of any particular pitch, and he also made experiments on the mechanism of voice-production. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... not consider the laws of acoustics: a whisper becomes a peal of thunder in the focus of reverberation. Allow me to explain this: sounds striking on concave surfaces are reflected from them, and, after reflection, converge to points which ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... is wholly determined by the rapidity of the vibration, as the intensity is by the amplitude. What pitch is to the ear in acoustics, colour is to the eye in the undulatory theory of light. Though never seen, the lengths of the waves of light have been determined. Their existence is proved by their effects, and from their effects also ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall |
