Page 22 - Fall2021

FEATURED ARTICLE
One-Hundred Years of English- Language Acoustics Textbooks
Steven L. Garrett
“A computer can provide the wrong answer with 7-digit precision a thousand times each second.” (Garrett, 2020)
It is always worthwhile to reflect on the journey that has brought us to the current stage in our careers utilizing acoustical science and technologies. For many of us, the journey started with a friend, family member, teacher, or summer internship. What is rarely heard is the claim that the journey was started with a textbook. Yet, the text- book used in the introductory course(s) in vibration and sound usually created the vocabulary and provided the analytical techniques that we exploited when we entered training for various specialization, whether in ocean acoustics, bioacoustics, architectural acoustics, noise control, psychoacoustics, biomedical acoustics, speech, audiology, engineering, or physical acoustics. The choice of textbook topics and their coverage is neither unique nor universal. All of those choices reflect the prejudices of their authors.
The purpose of this article is to consider the “evolution” of English-language acoustics textbooks. Although this seems like a rather specialized topic, it is likely that each reader, no matter the field, has encountered one or a few textbooks that have influenced their education and careers. Thus, even if a reader did not use the textbooks discussed here, a fine outcome of reading this article might be to motivate readers to think about the most important textbooks they used, about the textbooks from which they are currently teaching or studying, and whether these textbooks have had influence in their respective fields.
Historical Context
For the past eighty-five years, two versions of one textbook have dominated the education of acoustics students through- out the United States and in many other English-speaking
countries.Itcanbearguedatamacroscopiclevelthatthese textbooks, Morse’s Vibration and Sound (1948) and Kinsler and Frey’s Fundamentals of Acoustics (1962), have done a good job of introducing aspiring acousticians to the field since there has clearly been progress during that time.
Given the progress that has taken place, it seems worth- while to review the antecedents that led to those two textbooks as well as to examine the assumptions and prejudices those textbooks perpetuate. Over the past cen- tury, there have been gargantuan changes in the way that acoustics is practiced and the computational tools that have become available for calculation of the behavior of acoustical systems, whereas the content of acoustics text- books has remained relatively stagnant with their focus on theoretical analyses to the exclusion of an experimen- talist’s perspective.
In acoustics, I like to mark the start of this transforma- tive century in measurement with the invention of the condenser microphone by Wente in 1917. This was fol- lowed by the development of vacuum tube electronics that made it possible to produce instrumentation with a high-input electrical impedance that was also capable of providing substantial gain.
The corresponding explosion in computing power took place about a half-century later as digital electronics first exerted widespread influence within the acoustics community. For acoustics students, this change was heralded by the availabil- ity of handheld scientific calculators that replaced the slide rule as the preferred tool for the evaluation of mathemati- cal expressions. The HP-35 was the first “scientific calculator” (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-35). It was introduced in 1972 for $395, equivalent to nearly $2,500 today.
By the 1980s, most scientists possessed desktop personal computers and software that could plot data and use
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22 Acoustics Today • Fall 2021 | Volume 17, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2021.17.3.22