Description
Had Sound Sources been written some 2,500 years ago, theories and practices in hearing sciences today would be altogether different. The evidence of total stagnation in the science is the place of pitch at the forefront of hearing research after twenty-five centuries of efforts to explain the pitch of the sound generated by an acoustic system as simple as a stretched string. Technological advancements in sound wave analysis have only crowned all efforts with a mystery—the pitch enigma. Why?
To answer, Sound Sources traces the underlying cause of the problem to a fundamental mechanical error in the work of Pythagoras—the hub of all work in hearing. By redressing the mechanical foundation of hearing sciences, the originality of Sound Sources is indisputable. It resolves the mechanical invariance problem after 2.5 millenniums. The entire work—diagnoses of current theories, formulation of research hypotheses, design and implementation of experiments, data analyses, questions raised, answers proposed—is guided by the pivotal concept of invariance in psychophysics.
No other work has ever attempted the tasks accomplished in Sound Sources. Thus, Sound Sources will, arguably, bring the era of prehistoric physics of sound, mathematical reductionism, and philosophical speculations in hearing sciences to a close, as it establishes the way to do hearing research scientifically. Without exaggeration, any work in hearing that does not consider the guidelines in Sound Sources could be 2,500 years behind time.
