Page 48 - Winter2014

book Reviews
“While it would always be possible
to find terms not covered in a dictionary like this one, A Dictionary of Hearing misses very few.”
the definitions provided in A Dictionary of Hearing and those found in national and international standards are small, and probably inconsequential; in other cases the differences are significant. For instance, pitch is defined as “The individual listener’s subjective impression of frequency. High-frequency tones are heard as high pitch and low-frequency tones are heard as low pitch.” Tying the term “pitch” to only the fre- quency of tonal sounds ignores 150 years of research on pitch perception documenting the complex relationship between the term “pitch” and the acoustic conditions (e.g., the pitch of a person’s voice) that lead to the perception of pitch.
What is good about A Dictionary of Hearing is the large number of terms that are defined, especially those dealing with diagnosing and treating hearing loss. I am not aware of dictionaries or other references that cover such a large number of terms. If A Dictionary of Hearing were used in combina- tion with standardized definitions of terms and measure- ments, both students and professionals could discover useful meanings of terms used in the fields of hearing. And many, like this reviewer, are likely to enjoy the brief historical refer- ences to people in the field provided in the onomastic descrip- tions.
glean the meaning of a term listed in the dictionary. Thus, students and those not close to the field would gain an ap- preciation of the meaning of most of the 4000 terms listed in the dictionary. The informal style of definition comes at the cost of a lack of accuracy in some cases. A definition like that for emission, otoacoustic (OAE)’ as “sounds produced by the outer hair cells......” provides a hint of what an OAE might be, but “tiny” is not
an appropriate characterization of sound.
My major disappointment about A Dictionary of Hearing is the lack of any reference to definitions and measurements that have been standardized both nationally and internationally. The list of acronyms in the dictionary contains ISO (Inter- national Standards Organization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), as well as the obsolete ASA (American Standards Association, neither ANSI-American National Standards Institute- nor Acoustical Society of Ameri- ca are listed). Moreover, no mention is made of the defini- tions of a large number of acoustic and psychoacoustic terms provided in several standards published by these organizations and used worldwide. In many cases the differences between
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46 | Acoustics Today | Winter 2014