§B
What is sound?
§B · Bibliography

Bibliography

Sources and further reading.

Works cited and consulted in What is sound?. Entries are listed chronologically. History sections throughout the book cite into this page by short-key anchor — e.g. Laplace 1816.

  1. Newton, I. (1687). Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Book II. Royal Society.

    Contains the first theoretical calculation of the speed of sound — based on isothermal compression — giving the famously incorrect value of about 280 m/s.

    #newton-1687
  2. Huygens, C. (1690). Traité de la lumière. Pierre van der Aa, Leiden.

    Introduced the principle that every point on a wavefront acts as a secondary source. Unifies reflection, refraction, and diffraction.

    #huygens-1690
  3. d'Alembert, J. (1747). Recherches sur la courbe que forme une corde tendue mise en vibration. Hist. Acad. Royale Sci. Belles-Lettres Berlin 3: 214–219.

    First published the general solution f(x − ct) + g(x + ct) of the 1-D wave equation.

    #dalembert-1747
  4. Euler, L. (1755). Principes généraux du mouvement des fluides. Mémoires de l'académie des sciences de Berlin 11: 274–315.

    First statement of the fluid equations of motion in their modern form — what we now call the Euler equations.

    #euler-1755
  5. Laplace, P.-S. (1816). Sur la vitesse du son dans l'air et dans l'eau. Annales de chimie et de physique 3: 238–241.

    Corrected Newton's isothermal assumption to adiabatic, recovering c ≈ 343 m/s in agreement with experiment. The factor γ = c_p/c_v enters acoustics from here.

    #laplace-1816
  6. Fourier, J. (1822). Théorie analytique de la chaleur. Firmin Didot, Paris.

    Introduced the decomposition of arbitrary functions into trigonometric series, motivated by the heat equation. The mathematical foundation of frequency-domain analysis.

    #fourier-1822
  7. Rayleigh, J. W. S. (1894). The Theory of Sound (2nd ed.). Macmillan, London.

    The original comprehensive English-language acoustics text. Still readable; still cited.

    #rayleigh-1894
  8. Sabine, W. C. (1900). Reverberation. The American Architect 7.

    Founded modern architectural acoustics by deriving T_60 = 0.161 V/A from measurements at Harvard's Fogg Lecture Room.

    #sabine-1900
  9. Einstein, A. (1905). Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen. Annalen der Physik 17: 549–560.

    Derived the mean-squared-displacement relation for Brownian motion, giving the first quantitative evidence that molecules are real.

    #einstein-1905
  10. Lighthill, M. J. (1952). On sound generated aerodynamically. I. General theory. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 211: 564–587.

    Founded aeroacoustics. Rewrote Navier–Stokes as a wave equation with a quadrupole source term — the basis of the U^8 law for jet noise.

    #lighthill-1952
  11. Morse, P. M., & Ingard, K. U. (1968). Theoretical Acoustics. McGraw-Hill (re-issued Princeton 1986). ↗ online

    The classic theoretical treatment. Especially strong on scattering, radiation, and moving-media acoustics.

    #morse-ingard-1968
  12. Landau, L. D., & Lifshitz, E. M. (1987). Fluid Mechanics (2nd ed., Course of Theoretical Physics, vol. 6). Pergamon. ↗ online

    The densest and most authoritative continuum-mechanics treatment in print. Chapter VIII (§§64–81) on sound is the spine of our wave-equation chapter.

    #landau-vol6
  13. Kinsler, L. E., Frey, A. R., Coppens, A. B., & Sanders, J. V. (2000). Fundamentals of Acoustics (4th ed.). Wiley. ↗ online

    The standard US engineering-acoustics textbook. Practical, broad, slightly dry. Used here as the comparison curriculum.

    #kinsler-2000