Master Handbook of Acoustics
Practical Instruction on the Art and Science of Acoustic Design and ArchitectureBuild your own acoustic environments such as recording studios, control rooms, and home listening rooms with expert insights from two engineering professionals. Fully expanded to cover the latest methods and software tools, Master Handbook of Acoustics, Fifth Edition presents clear explanations of acoustic phenomena and provides a hands-on approach to room design. Learn how to perform acoustic measurements, choose room dimensions, assign speaker placement, analyze response curves, and design and install sound absorbers and diffusers. You will also find details on how to fine-tune room reverberation, minimize external noise, and apply psychoacoustic concepts.Master Handbook of Acoustics, Fifth Edition explains how to:Determine how sound propagates in open and enclosed spacesMeasure sound-pressure levels and work with decibelsAnalyze the characteristics of room modal resonancesTreat rooms for optimal early reflections, reverberation, and diffusionMinimize acoustic distortion, comb-filter effects, and HVAC interferenceConstruct high-quality stereo and surround-sound listening roomsDesign personal and professional recording studios and control roomsUnderstand the acoustics of auditoriums and concert hallsOptimize room designs using measurement, modeling, and auralization software
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What Hacker News says
- For a book that's lightly technical, there's F. Alton Everest's "Master Handbook of Acoustics" that discusses many aspects of acoustics, but does cover noise control and sound abatement.
For more technical treatments, my go-to books are Leo Beranek's "Acoustics" (or Beranek's "Noise and Vibration Control" if you just care about the noise control aspect) and "Fundamentals of Acoustics" by Kinsler and Frey.
- In addition to what jzwinck recommended, I'd also recommend the Loudspeaker Design Cookbook [0] and the Master Handbook of Acoustics [1]
If you're an engineer that's comfortable with differential calculus, I'd recommend the grandaddy of them all: Acoustics by Beranek [2] (I'm actually linking to Acoustics: Sound Fields and Transducers which is an updated version of Beranek's original Acoustics cowritten with Tim Mellow)
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Loudspeaker-Design-Cookbook-Vance-Dick...
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Master-Handbook-Acoustics-Alton-Everes...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Acoustics-Transducers-Leo-L-Beranek/dp...
- This reminds me of F. Alton Everest's notes in "The Master Handbook of Acoustics" that the threshold of hearing lies coincident with the SPL of Brownian motion of air particles on the ear drum... except this is with respect to light.
- Beyond hearing your own heartbeat after a while, an ultimate psycho-acoustic experiment: hearing air molecules hit your eardrums.
Taken from Master Handbook of Acoustics 5th edition (page 39-40): The human ear cannot detect sounds softer than the motion of air particles on the eardrum. This is the threshold of hearing. There would be no reason to have ears more sensitive, because any lower-level sound would be drowned by the air-particle noise. This means that the ultimate sensitivity of our hearing just matches the softest sounds possible in an air medium.
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