Lectures

• Week 0 (23 September) - Administration, Course Overview, Physics Review
• Week 1 (28 September) - Vibrating Systems, Discrete-Time/Frequency Analysis
• Week 2 (5 October) - Waves, Resonance
• Week 3 (12 October) - Hearing, Sound Pressure & Power, Perceptual Aspects of Hearing
• Self Study - Combination Tones, Musical Scales & Temperament
• Week 4 (19 October) - String Instruments
• Week 5 (26 October) - Brass Instruments, Midterm
• Week 6 (2 November) - Woodwind Instruments
• Week 7 (9 November) - Percussion Instruments and Keyboard Instruments
• Week 8 (16 November) - Speech Production, Recognition and Synthesis
• Week 9 (23 November) - Singing, Auditorium Acoustics, Electronic Reinforcement of Sound
• Week 10 (30 November) - High-Fidelity Sound-Reproducing Systems
• Final (Thursday 9 December 1999, 7-10 PM) - could change with unanimous consent of all students

This course is about vibrating objects. An object will emit sound if it vibrates between a rate of about 20 - 20,000 cycles/second or Hertz (Hz) and there exists a means for some of those vibrations to be converted to sound pressure variations. Sound is just the vibration of air or variations of the ambient air pressure at a rate within the limited range of the human auditory system.

We will study the way objects vibrate, the way those vibrations are converted to sound, the way the sounds propagate within a room, and the way our auditory system senses such sounds.