[AUDITORY] Book “100 stories of sound in 100 words each”

[Bomjun Kwon <alist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear fellow Auditory-lovers,

I want to introduce something you might find interesting. I have written 
a book for the general public. The tentative title is "100 stories of 
sound in 100 words each." Yes, the total number of words of the main 
text is 10,000 indeed! It is a collection of short essays on various 
topics of acoustics, audio, music, speech and hearing. It is definitely 
not a textbook; rather it is meant to be both entertaining and 
enlightening, and ultimately inspiring. It should be a light reading but 
with a long-lasting touch.

Personally, it was a long overdue project. I started it a while ago (5-6 
years ago?) and finished the first draft about 2 years ago. I tried to 
publish it with a publisher, but it's going nowhere. So far, everyone I 
talked to about this liked it; but I'm certain that no one would pay 
money for it. OK. I get it. I'm probably going for a self-publishing 
route, aka a money-draining (not money-grabbing) route.

Now, I'm not asking you to pay money, but can I ask you to pay your 
attention instead? I am going to share some parts of the book with this 
community, and I would like to hear from you. Comments, suggestions, 
anyone?  Nice ones would be good. Nasty ones would still be of use—then 
I would know there was a success at least in the noise marketing.

Below you'll see the table of contents. Have an idea of what these 100 
stories are like. In a separate thread, I will post a few samples. 
Depending on your reactions, I may post more, or less. Also, if you have 
anything that you want to see, make a request here. I may post it if I'm 
in a good mood.

Bomjun Kwon
bjkwon@xxxxxxxxx

Former auditory scientist/professor/researcher/church choir accompanist
Current Audio DSP/Software Engineer/Creator of 
AUXLAB/Pianist/Father/Husband/Progressive Evangelical 
Christian/Uncertified Feminist

TABLE OF CONTENTS-------------------

FUNDAMENTALS
1. Do you know sound?
2. Sound as a wave
3. Frequency of a sound
4. Sound--tiny power, huge impact
5. Resonance--Birds of a feather flock together
6. Breaking a wine glass with her voice
7. Waveform
8. Fundamental frequency, harmonics, and a pure tone
9. Spectrum
10. Attributes of sound
11. What is pitch?
12. Spectrogram

PHYSICS OF SOUNDS
13. The Doppler effect and an ice cream truck
14. Resonance--good vibration
15. Resonance--bad vibration
16. Electric filter vs acoustic filter
17. Loud not necessarily intense
18. Public announcements and speeches without modern technology
19. Outdoor concert is best at night
20. Can you hear your own voice?
21. Impedance matching

HEARING
22. How do we hear sounds?
23. 0 dBSPL--the lowest sound level human can hear?
24. Acoustic reflex
25. Peripheral hearing
26. Echolocation
27. Missing fundamental frequency
28. Hearing low pitch without low frequencies
29. Pitch of atonal sound
30. If you mix two pure tones with frequencies of 100 Hz and 102 Hz,
31. Then what happens when you mix 100 Hz and 150 Hz?
32. Hmm, what about 100 Hz and 200 Hz?
33. Here's a twist--what about 100 Hz and 201 Hz?
34. Why is static noise sometimes soothing?
35. Hearing with two ears
36. Following an object moving up/down

HEARING HEALTH
37. My ear hurts. Am I going deaf?
38. My ear still hurts. Am I really OK?
39. A preventable cause of hearing loss
40. Do we know when a sound is too loud?
41. Dangerous noise sources in everyday life
42. Hyperacusis and that sound of fingernails scraping a chalkboard
43. We are bound to be deaf
44. Deaf people don't have silence
45. Would you rather be blind or be deaf?
46. How it works: a cochlear implant
47. Understanding speech with cochlear implants
48. How well do cochlear implants work?
49. What does the sound sound like through cochlear implants?

AUDIO TECHNOLOGIES
50. Audiophiles
51. Analog vs digital
52. Digitizing
53. Reverberation is magic
54. HiFi is not enough--toward the recreation of the sound field
55. MIDI music can't beat human music
56. Studio recordings can't beat live music.
57. Reasons to avoid cheap headphones
58. Foley artists
59. Backmasking and satanism in rock music
60. Why we should give another look at LP records

CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT MUSIC
61. Music--a rule-bound language
62. Is music universal?
63. Flexibility of musical pitch
64. Voice pitch, musical pitch
65. Perfect pitch: a flashy word
66. Pseudo-perfect pitch: not so flashy but real
67. Unison and octave
68. Pythagoras, the world's first acoustician
69. Frequencies of musical notes
70. Equal temperament scale---a great compromise
71. No Tower of Babel for music
72. What's the deal with 12 notes in an octave?
73. Piano tuners must have a great sense of pitch, right?

SPEECH COMMUNICATION--VOICING YOURSELF AND HEARING OTHERS
74. How it's made: your voice
75. Formants
76. Recognizing speech--bottom up
77. Recognizing speech--top down
78. Phonetics lost. Miserably.
79. Then, what good is phonetics?
80. How do we tell "bay" from "pay?"
81. Categorical perception
82. Korean Kim vs American Kim
83. How do we tell "bay" from "day"?
84. Non-categorical perception and learning foreign languages
85. Why formants are not a robust indicator of vowels
86. How do we tell a man's voice from a woman's?
87. Voice, masculinized or feminized
88. Voice of transgender people

SOUND BEYOND SOUND
89. What is sound, anyway?
90. Overcoming noise
91. Can we run away from sound?
92. Auditory inception
93. Can you really hear the wind?
94. Pursuit of silence
95. Silence is a mirage
96. Though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not 
understand
97. See what you hear. Hear what you see.
98. Infrasound
99. Audiographic memory
100. The best thing you can do to a dying person--say something nice