20: Science & Music, Sir James Jeans

A basic scientific introduction to music. I'd had it lying around for a while, and I picked it up because Melissa recently read some book about music and was spouting random factoids at work. The woman has a far greater influence on my reading habits than is healthy. I hope she doesn't develop an obsession with Michael Crighton or some such nonsense.

Anyway: mostly stuff I'd read before, but a few new things. The chapters on Harmony and Discord were slow going at times (o! the scales of those crazy Greeks), but the ones on accoustics and reverberation were surprisingly pleasant. Most interesting it was to learn that substances like plaster and tile absorb higher frequency sounds much better than lower frequency ones. In a tiled or plastered room, lower sounds will echo around the room for longer periods of time than higher notes. (The larger the room, the longer they bounce around, of course, since they encounter fewer absorbing surfaces per unit distance travelled.) In Jeans's own words:

A bass or tenor voice will resound in all its richness, since its harmonics are only filtered out to a slight degree, but the same is not true for a sproano, hence the peculiary male pleasure of singing in the bathroom.