Page 56 - Acoustics Today Summer 2011

Passings
Dick Stern
1150 Linden Hall Road Boalsburg, Pennsylvania 16827
Cyril M. Harris
1917–2011
The following are remarks presented by Steven L. Garrett on 18 March 2011 to the
Century Association, New York, New York on the occasion of a celebration of the life of Cyril M. Harris
CYRIL M. HARRIS MEMORIAL—A PHYSICIST’S VIEW
Steven L. Garrett
Graduate Program in Acoustics, The Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pennsylvania 16802
In a sense, I met Cyril before he met me. I was a physics graduate student at UCLA, in Isadore Rudnick’s research group, studying sound propagation in superfluid helium at temperatures close to absolute zero. As any physician will tell you, your area of expertise doesn’t matter in a social setting. People will solicit your opinion about any medical malady. A similar response will be elicited if you identify yourself as an acoustician. It did not matter that I studied the acoustical properties of quantum fluids. If I said I was an acoustician in public, people invariably asked me about concert halls, their stereo system, or a noise problem in their home or neighborhood.
I was also interested in those subjects,
so I asked Professor Isadore Rudnick to
recommend a book. Without hesitation,
he recommended Cyril’s book, Acoustical Designing in Architecture,1 which Cyril co-authored with Vern Knudsen. It was a perfect introduction to the subject for a physicist, as you will appreciate from this quotation taken from the introduc- tion: “The emphasis is on basic principles which do not change with time, since these are based on the Laws of Physics.”
I was fortunate to have met Cyril for the first time shortly after reading his book when he was in Los Angeles visiting Izzy Rudnick at UCLA. I was enchanted by his charming personali- ty. I remember asking him if there were any other “basic princi- ples” that he identified after Acoustical Designing in Architecture was published. He responded that he felt that the book did not give broadband diffraction the emphasis it deserved.
Cyril’s book did not only impress graduate students. His peers had a very high opinion of his work. The review of Acoustical Designing in Architecture that appeared in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America included the follow- ing: “Here is a lucid presentation that makes one almost forget the difficult task the authors patterned for themselves... It is my feeling that acousticians should seize every opportunity to recommend this book to all concerned with architec- ture. Knudsen and Harris have deftly formed the ball encompassing architec- tural acoustics; the least the rest of us can do is to give it a shove!”2
Cyril had equal respect for the Acoustical Society and generously donat- ed his copyright to allow a low-cost reprinting: “The Acoustical Society of
America... has done more for the field of architectural
acoustics than any other organization. To further this activity,
all royalties from the paperback edition have been assigned to
the Society.” He was President of the Acoustical Society of
America from 1964 to 1965. The Acoustical Society of
America was not the only professional society to benefit from
Cyril’s generosity. He donated the reprint rights to his book
Noise Control in Buildings to the Institute of Noise Control
3
comment on the half-dozen books Cyril wrote on architectur- al subjects, but I can point out that in the span of sixty years, from 1945 to 2005, Cyril published fifty-four articles in the
Engineering.
Not being a professional architect, I am unqualified to
Acoustics Today accepts contributions for “Passings.” Submissions of about 250 words that may be edited in MSWord or plain text files should be e-mailed to AcousticsToday@aip.org. Photographs may be informal, but must be at least 300 dpi. Please send the text and photographs in separate files.
52 Acoustics Today, July 2011