Page 86 - Fall2021

MY ACOUSTICS LIBRARY
Waves: Their Shape and Speed. In February 1987, I received a package with Sound Waves: Their Shape and Speed and a letter noting that Morse’s daughter had searched the last of the unopened boxes of books “and has found the enclosed book which we gladly return to you.”
In 2004, I received a call from James Knudsen, one of Knud- sen’s grandchildren, who found me on the ASA Regional Chapter web page, informing me that the family was donating Knudsen’s home to UCLA. He assumed I did not know his grandfather. I replied that not only did I know of his grandfather but had also taken classes in the building named after him. So I went over to the house and found many boxes of personal papers, bibles, awards, medals, let- ters, and files from his time at UCLA as well as some boxes of books. A report of this can be found in Acoustics Today (Shaw, 2011). Anyway, the upshot is that the UCLA Archives accepted all material except the books. These resided in my wine cellar for many years until Steven Garrett from Penn State University, University Park, came to visit; we were graduate students together at UCLA and have kept in touch over the years. He suggested that Knudsen’s books come to Penn State and join those of Harris (1979), the coauthor of Acoustical Designing in Architecture (Knudsen and Harris 1954). I informed the family of this; they agreed and added that I could select one book to keep. I selected a thin volume, Anecdotal History of the Science of Sound (Miller, 1935). The inscription is seen in Figure 2, right.
I could go on about how the library and reviews led to my proofreading a contemporary text on electroacoustics (I learned a lot of things that I thought I knew) and the preface to a reprint edition of a classic two-volume room acoustics text, my commemorating a mentor’s books at his memorial, and “live” presentations as well as more tales from musty places, but I have more than run out of space. And, yes, the library has found a home; the uni- versity will be announcing details later this year.
References
Beranek, L. L. (1954). Acoustics. Mc-Graw-Hill Book Company, New York, NY.
Beranek, L. L. (1971). Noise and Vibration Control. Mc-Graw-Hill Book Company, New York, NY.
Bode, H. W. (1945). Network Analysis and Feedback Amplifier Design. D. Van Nostrand Company, New York, NY.
Eargle, J. M. (1981). The Microphone Book. Elar, Plainview, NY. Egan, M. D. (1988). Architectural Acoustics. McGraw-Hill Book Com-
pany, New York, NY. Reprint available at https://bit.ly/3o7n290. Fletcher, H. (1929). Speech and Hearing. D. Van Nostrand Company,
New York, NY.
Fletcher, H. (1953). Speech and Hearing in Communication. D. Van Nostrand Company, New York, NY. Reprint edition available from the Acoustical Society of America, Melville, NY.
Greenlees, A. E. (1939). The Amplification and Distribution of Sound. Sherwood Press, Cleveland, OH. Available at https://bit.ly/3exF29i. Harris, C. M. (1979). Handbook of Noise Control. McGraw-Hill Book
Company, New York, NY.
Hunt, F. V. (1954). Electroacoustics. Harvard University Press, Cam-
bridge MA. Reprint edition available from the Acoustical Society of America, Melville, NY.
Kinsler, L. E., and Frey, A. R. (1962). Fundamentals of Acoustics, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY. Available at https://acousticstoday.org/Kinsler-foa.
Kleiner, M. (2013). Electroacoustics. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL. Knudsen, V. O. (1932). Architectural Acoustics. John Wiley & Sons,
New York, NY.
Knudsen, V. O., and Harris, C. M. (1950). Acoustical Designing in
Architecture. John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY.
Lamb, H. (1965). Hydrodynamics, 1st US ed. Dover Publications,
New York, NY.
Leach, W. M., Jr. (1998). Introduction to Electroacoustics and Audio
Amplifiers. Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, Dubuque, IA. Mason, W. P. (1942). Electromechanical Transducers and Wave Filters.
D. Van Nostrand Company, New York, NY.
Miller, D. C. (1935). Anecdotal History of the Science of Sound. Mac-
millan Company, New York, NY.
Miller, D. C. (1937). Sound Waves: Their Shape and Speed. The Mac-
millan Company, New York, NY.
Morse, P. M. (1936). Vibration and Sound. Mc-Graw-Hill Book Com-
pany, New York, NY. Reprint edition available at
https://www.abdi-ecommerce10.com/asa/p-258-vibration-and-sound.aspx. Morse, P. M. (1976). In the Beginnings: A Physicists Life. The MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA. Available at
https://mitpress.mit.edu/contributors/philip-m-morse.
Morse, P. M., and Ingard, K. U. (1968). Theoretical Acoustics. McGraw-
Hill Book Company, New York, NY.
Olson, H. F. (1957). Acoustical Engineering. D. Van Nostrand Company, New York,
NY. Reprinted by Professional Audio Journals, Inc., Philadelphia, PA, 1991. Rossi, M. (1988). Acoustics and Electroacoustics. Artech House, Nor-
wood, MA. Translated by P. Roe and W. Rupert.
Sabine, W. C. (1922). Collected Papers on Acoustics, 3rd printing. Har-
vard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Reprint edition available at
https://bit.ly/3tzyOtG
Schelkunoff, S. A. (1943). Electromagnetic Waves. D. Van Nostrand Company, New York, NY.
Shaw, N. A. (2001). Review of Master Handbook of Acoustics, 4th ed, by F. Alton Everest, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY. The Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America 110(4), 1714-1715.
Shaw, N. A. (2004). Books on Acoustics: On the occasion of his 90th birthday,
the special session to honor the contributions of Leo L. Beranek to acoustics
and teaching. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 115, 2531. Shaw, N. A. (2011). Up in Knudsen’s attic: Some private papers of Vern
O. Knudsen. Acoustics Today 7(1), 29-35
Shaw, N. A., Klapholz, J., and Gander, M. R. (1994). Books and acous-
tics, especially Wallace Clement Sabine’s collected papers on acoustics, Paper 1aAAb2, Architectural Acoustics Session IIb. Proceedings of the Wallace Clement Sabine Centennial Symposium, June 5-7, 1994.
Contact Information
Neil A. Shaw menlo@ieee.org
Menlo Scientific Acoustics, Inc. P.O. Box 1610
Topanga, California 90290, USA
86 Acoustics Today • Fall 2021