"Acoustics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Tom, as he sat at his work table with pencil and paper before him, "since this is a problem in acoustics, I had best begin. I suppose by going back to first principles, and after determining what makes an aeroplane engine noisy, try to figure out how to make it quiet. Now as to the first, the principle causes of ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Scout - or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky • Victor Appleton
... pneumatics and hydrostatics), digests, oxygenises its blood (millions of years before Sir Humphry Davy discovered oxygen), sees and hears—all most difficult and complicated operations, involving an unconscious knowledge of the facts concerning optics and acoustics, compared with which the conscious discoveries of Newton sink into utter insignificance? Shall we say that a baby can do all these things at once, doing them so well and so regularly, without being even ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... HOW TO BECOME A SCIENTIST.—A useful and instructive book, giving a complete treatise on chemistry; also experiments in acoustics, mechanics, mathematics, chemistry, and directions for making fireworks, colored fires, and gas balloons. This ...
— The Bradys Beyond Their Depth - The Great Swamp Mystery • Anonymous
... questions, 'What is light?' and 'What is heat?' have occurred to the minds of men; but these questions never would have been answered had they not been preceded by the question, 'What is sound?' Amid the grosser phenomena of acoustics the mind was first disciplined, conceptions being thus obtained from direct observation, which were afterwards applied to phenomena of a character far too subtle to be observed directly. Sound we know to be due to vibratory motion. A vibrating tuning-fork, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Neither railroads, telegraphs, nor cheap postage had been established. Enthusiastic inventors yet sucked their fingers in garrets, waiting for the good time coming; and philanthropic statesmen aired their vocabularies in vain, in Congressional halls, built in defiance of acoustics. Their words rose, their fine sentiments curled up and down the pillars of the temple of eloquence, and fell flat to the floor. Meanwhile human nature travelled by stage-coaches; and postage for over a hundred miles rose to eighteen cents. Not a lover's sigh for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... The anatomy and physiology of the vocal organs have been exhaustively studied by a vast number of highly trained experts. So far as the muscular operations of tone-production are concerned, and the laws of acoustics bearing on the vocal action, no new discovery can well be expected. But in this very fact, the exhaustive attention paid to the mechanical operations of the voice, is seen the incompleteness of Vocal ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... time to the perfection of his flute-playing and to the study of the orchestra, he became interested in the science of music. Helmholtz's recent discoveries in acoustics inspired him to make research in that direction. He ransacked the Peabody Library for books on the subject, many of them yet ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... musicale at Lady Dudley's, preceded by a luncheon, which Mr. Osbourne called "a snare," because, he said, I could not refuse to sing. I did not want to refuse, either. The piano was in the beautiful picture-gallery, all full of Greuze's pictures bought from the Vatican; it has the most wonderful acoustics, and the voice sounded splendidly in it. Lady Dudley is a celebrated beauty. Lord Dudley—before he succeeded to the title—was Lord Ward. The Duke and Duchess of Sutherland asked us to dine. This was a very imposing affair; the Duke of Cambridge was at ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... Newton's investigation); Echoes; Pipes and Vibrating Strings; Acoustics; the Mathematical ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... observation had the effect that the world-content of the naive consciousness simply ceased to exist, leaving the ensuing hiatus to be filled in by a pattern of imagined kinematic happenings - for example, colour by 'ether'-vibrations, heat by molecular movements. Not so in the sphere of acoustics. For here a part of the entire event, on account of its genuine kinetic character, remains a content of ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... risk of providing an acoustic wall and ceiling on my own account, however. Although the first performance on 26th December drew a large audience, it brought me in nothing but outrageously heavy expenses and great distress at the dismal effect of the orchestra owing to the bad acoustics. In spite of the dark outlook I decided to bear the cost of building a sound-screen, in order to enhance the effect of the two following concerts, when I flattered myself I might count on the success of the efforts that were being made to arouse ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... faintest rustle of sound. Carl froze. His own trouser leg? A trick of acoustics? ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... pump and hence a profound practical knowledge of the laws of pneumatics and hydrostatics), digests, oxygenises its blood—millions of years before any one had discovered oxygen—sees and hears, operations that involve an unconscious knowledge of the facts concerning optics and acoustics compared with which the conscious discoveries of Newton are insignificant—shall we say that a baby can do all these things at once, doing them so well and so regularly without being even able to give them attention, and yet without mistake, and shall we also say at the same time that it has ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... the day, Dr. Themison accompanied the amateurs by rail to Wrensham, to hear 'trial of the acoustics' of the Concert-hall. They were a goodly company; and there was fun in the railway-carriage over Colney's description of Fashionable London's vast octopus Malady-monster, who was letting the doctor fly to the tether of its longest filament for an hour, plying ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... I endeavor to calm the terror of my patients, excited still more by the elemental uproar without; vainly did I harangue them, in the plainest terms to which science is reducible, on atmospheric vibrations, acoustics, reverberations, and volcanic agencies; they insisted on some supernatural power having produced the recent fearful sounds. Neither common nor uncommon sense could prevail with them; and when they discovered, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... used in the title of books when the secondary or subtitle is in apposition to the leading one and when the conjunction or is omitted: "Acoustics: the ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... Calisthenic Lyceum by a notable financier on obligatory hydropathy, as accessory to the irrevocable and irreparable doctrine of evolution, which had been vehemently panegyrized by a splenetic professor of acoustics, and simultaneously denounced by a complaisant opponent as an undemonstrated romance of the last decade, amenable to no reasoning, however allopathic, outside of ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... its full extent the art of the mime in conjunction with spoken speech would be absurd. The light and shade in the speech of the most "natural" actor—say, Mr Charles Hawtrey—is violently exaggerated on account of the peculiar acoustics of the theatre; amongst other things, the player has to address those far off in the galleries as well as those close to in the stalls, and therefore his work requires a series of compromises like that of a piano-tuner anxious to avoid "wolves" or a politician eager to win votes. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... are able to discover marks of marks), a science, though always remaining inductive, tends to become also deductive, and, to the same extent, to cease to be one of the experimental sciences, in which, as still in chemistry, though no longer in mechanics, optics, hydrostatics, acoustics, thermology, and astronomy, each generalisation rests on a special induction, and the reasonings consist ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... ring also in sympathy at the bottom of the Channel—a pretty habit, which would suggest that bell metal is happily and wisely superior to changes of religion, were it not explained by the unromantic principles of acoustics. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... knows as much about Norwich and its festivals as any one, is quite unable to throw any light on this mystic remark. There were complaints about the acoustics of the St. Andrew's Hall many years ago, but there appears to be no historic foundation for Dickens' reference. It would certainly be interesting to know what suggested ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... induction from as many different sets of experiments, have come to be exhibited as deductions or corollaries from inductive propositions of a simpler and more universal character. Thus mechanics, hydrostatics, optics, acoustics, thermology, have successively been rendered mathematical; and astronomy was brought by Newton within the laws of general mechanics. Why it is that the substitution of this circuitous mode of proceeding for a process apparently much easier ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... various sciences are obvious of themselves, with the exception of Physics, which is a group of sciences rather than a single science, and is again divided by M. Comte into five departments: Barology, or the science of weight; Thermology, or that of heat; Acoustics, Optics, and Electrology. These he attempts to arrange on the same principle of increasing speciality and complexity, but they hardly admit of such a scale, and M. Comte's mode of placing them varied at different periods. All the five being essentially ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill |
