Customer Reviews

Fundamentals of Physical Acoustics

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Dr. Blackstock is one of the most lucid technical writers I have encoutered in my (long) career as a phd candidate at UT-Austin Acoustics. If you are trying to understand physical acoustics there is no better book. Kinsler and Frey is weak in comparison. From this book, one can easily step up to Morse's classic Vibration and Sound, or even Theoretical Acoustics with out a flinch. This book is definetely a must have on your personal library.

I think this is one of the best books on Physical Acoustics.
I would recommend this book to anyone starting to learn acoustics. This statement does not mean that advanced students should not go for this book, as it also covers advanced materials.

My opinion about the book can resumed as follows:

- Clear and concise
- Very good presentation
- Relatively easy to follow
- Very good for self-studying (plan to study the book is recommended by the author)
- There is a derivation (or instructions on how to get) to almost every equation in the book.
- Not too theoretical. Many practical interpretations of the mathematical results are given. (percentage of mathematics well balanced)
- The author makes apparently difficult material simple!

From this book one can jump to more advanced texts (Theoretical Acoustics by Morse and Ingard and Acoustics - An Introduction to its Physical Principles and Applications by Pierce).

Fundamentals of Acoustics by Kinsler et al is also a good book for a beginner, but I think this one is much better.

Moral of the story, I really like this book!

Ps: This is an opinion of a beginner on Physical Acoustics more interested in air applications, that never had lessons about this topic. I don't know if my opinion will change as my knowledge on this field increases:) I doubt it!

I knew I liked this book when I read section C of the introduction:

"How is the wave equation derived? Three common physical systems that carry waves - the electrical transmission line, the flexible string, and the compressible fluid - are considered in this section."

I needed a practical book to help me when I somehow volunteered myself to perform some acoustic experiments at work. They kind of said "Hey, you're a physicist. Can you do this?" And then I said "Uh... sure." I read through what I could find in Halliday and Resnick, a book I like for its simplicity. But then I needed something more complicated, so I bought Morse and Ingard, which was way too much. Then I found this book.

And its a good thing I did. The book uses the wave equation to solve each of these problems, and if you pay attention, you can assemble a nice, general approach to solving problems of this nature, and you'll have a list of analogous variables when you're done. The whole book is written like this. It's not an ASM Handbook by any means, but it is more practical than Morse and Ingard, has more drawings and diagrams, and I was surprised to find one of the cleanest, simplest descriptions of Bessel functions I've seen yet. The book addresses the complex problems without doing endless integrals, and it whenever possible it works through the problem and doesn't rely on phrases like "the reduction of step X to step Y is left as an exercise for the student" in its derivations. I appreciate this - it makes the book more friendly as a reference text.

Also, when I was a graduate student I never paid attention to literature references in text books because I (naively) considered them to be outdated. But a literature search is one of the best tools I have available to me in the working world - if you have access to a literature database, you will find the literature references at the end of some chapters to be very useful.

Consider it a useful reference text, and probably a practical textbook as well.

I find this book clear and concise. This is the reference I use most often at work when I want insight into the physics behind a noise or vibration problem.

This book is geared towards graduate and upper undergraduate students in physics and engineering. The first nine chapters of the book are restricted to plane waves. Thus the first half of the book introduces the reader to a wide variety of acoustical concepts such as propagation, reflection, transmission, refraction, normal modes, horn theory, absorption, and dispersion. All the while, the first half of the book keeps mathematical complexity to a minimum. The second half of the book relies more on advanced mathematics and is a survey of advanced topics dependent on the reader understanding the first nine chapters of the book. For the second half of the book, it will be helpful if you know calculus as well as differential equations. Each chapter has plenty of exercises so you can practice what you've learned.

Although the coverage is not as broad as Kinser's book on acoustics, this book does a much better job of explaining the foundations of acoustics including the math, which can get quite involved. I really love how Blackstock makes use of figures when explaining concepts and adding in the mathematics to the figure explanation in a way that you will remember the material. My advice is that if you are looking for a good introduction to acoustics, this is the book to read. Once you conquer this and you want something broader that goes into such topics as nonlinear acoustics and underwater acoustics, you probably want to look at Kinsler's "Fundamentals of Acoustics". The following is the table of contents:

1. Introduction
2. Detailed Development of the Acoustical Wave Equation.
3. Reflection and Transmission of Normally Incident Plane Waves of Arbitrary Waveform.
4. Normal Incidence Continued: Steady-State Analysis.
5. Transmission Phenomena: Oblique Incidence.
6. Normal Modes in Cartesian Coordinates: Strings, Membranes, Rooms, and Rectangular Waveguides.
7. Horns.
8. Propagation in Stratified Media.
9. Propagation in Dissipative Fluids: Absorption and Dispersion.
10. Spherical Waves.
11. Cylindrical Waves.
12. Waveguides.
13. Radiation from a Baffled Piston.
14. Diffraction.
15. Arrays.

Let me point out some pros and cons of this book in my opinion.

Pros: Excellent description of essential ideas and concepts. The author is very careful about new ideas and concepts. Some of the difficult concepts could have been burried deep into the mathematical equations and derivations. Instead, this author tries to let you appreciate the physics behind the math. To be more specific, I think that this book has the best derivation on Bessel functions, spherical harmonics, and wave guides that I have seen.

Cons: The organizatoin of the book is kind of sloppy. The header does not even include the chaper number. The numbering system for the chapters is also non-standard making it hard to find a specific section. There are also quite some typos in the book. It might help to add one additional chapter on 1dof vibration just to introduce phasor and basic concepts. This is not critical though.

I borrowed a copy from my co-worker. I would buy a new 2nd edition without hesitation if the minor problems above are fixed.

Mr. Blackstock, a professor at the University of Texas, told me about this book. This book gives a good foundation into acoustics. I would recommend this book to anyone with a science, engineering or mathematics background who is interested in learning acoustics.

Having only got through the first few pages I can say that it is well written and written in a style that explains everything clearly.
No complaints at all.