Kua, Ja Hyon (Author)
Annals of Science: The History of Science and Technology
Volume: 63
Pages: 395--423
Between the 1860s and the 1910s, British acoustics was transformed from an area of empirical research into a mathematically organized field. Musical motives---improving musical scales and temperaments, making better musical instruments, and understanding the nature of musical tones---were among the major driving forces of acoustical researchers in nineteenth-century Britain. The German acoustician, Helmholtz, had a major impact on British acousticians who also had extensive interactions with American and French acousticians. Rayleigh's acoustics, reflecting all these features, bore remarkable fruit in his treatise The Theory of Sound, which successfully subjected empirical acoustics to analytical mathematics. His accomplishments made British acoustics a subfield of physics, thus distinguishing it from the `new acoustics' in early twentieth-century America.
...MoreDescription Looks at the shift of acoustics from an empirically defined discipline to a mathematical one, driven by efforts at addressing musical problems dealing with scales, temperaments, instruments, etc.
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