Customer Reviews

The Physics and Psychophysics of Music: An Introduction

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I only know the first edition of Juan Roederer's The PHYSICS AND PSYCHOPHYSICS OF MUSIC (almost hot off the presses when used as a textbook for my Spring 1980 Acoustics class for music majors), which I keep close at hand and refer to often (I'm strongly tempted to update though). This first edition at least is much superior to any other musical acoustics book I've encountered, and I've encountered a fair number of them.

It isn't perfect: There is some cultural bias in its explanation of tonality, and its explanation of just tuning is ahistorical and to this extent faulty.

And there are other worthy books: There is Helmholtz's ON THE SENSATIONS OF TONE, and there is the engaging introductory gloss, SCIENCE AND MUSIC by Sir James Jeans.

This is an excellent introductory book about the physics and psychophysics of music. It may be useful for general interested people as well as specialists, since it was written with little mathematics but deep concepts and explanations. In the first chapters the author explains the basic of the physics of music, and then he focus on the biological aspect of hearing and perception of sounds and musical sensations. The book has also three appendices for more advanced people with harder math. Very good figures and an easy-to-read prose complete the landscape of this outstanding book by this argentinian well-known physicist working in the US now.

excellent review of the subject; can serve as an introductory text in a course, or for self-guided reading; an entry point into an exciting new area in science and the arts; combines and broaches what have traditionally been thought of as very diverse fields; strongly recommend to the amateur as well as to the specialist

For the information contained in this book, it was one of the most awkward and long-winded reads i ever experienced. I simply do not agree with the many "kind" reviews readers have given this book. I suppose if you are into the "Harry Potter" stuff, this book may appeal to you- but if you want hard-core knowledge about sound and music, save your money. This text is basically the "glorified" lecture notes of a teachers-assistant (which the book admits), padded with ranting and commentary to "blow up" what would take no more than 20 pages to explain, into a 200+ page "yellow brick road to OZ". And it is not like the book contains "invaluable" knowledge. You can get this knowledge anywhere. With the extremely poor analysis of studies and research which the author is "suppose" to "distill" and convey to the reader, who needs this book!?! You learn nothing! With explanations so typical of a teacher's assistant author- round-about, inconcise, cute- I ended up re-reading passages several times, and afterwards, still saying to myself "what is this dude trying to say?". I already knew a lot of the information coming into this book- i bought it to fill "gaps" in my knowledge (or so i thought). I find this author is weak in the knowledge, weak in the explaining, and i am at a total loss figuring out how this author and this book has made it through three editions. I STRONGLY DO NOT RECOMMEND this book if you are trying to learn the physics of sound and music for the first time, or even the N-th time. If you buy this book, you are going to "rack your brains"!