Quotes about acoustics

A collection of quotes on the topic of acoustics, sound, soundness, space.

Quotes about acoustics

“Notwithstanding the eminent difficulties of the mathematical theory of sonorous vibrations, we owe to it such progress as has yet been made in acoustics. The formation of the differential equations proper to the phenomena is, independent of their integration, a very important acquisition, on account of the approximations which mathematical analysis allows between questions, otherwise heterogeneous, which lead to similar equations. This fundamental property, whose value we have so often to recognize, applies remarkably in the present case; and especially since the creation of mathematical thermology, whose principal equations are strongly analogous to those of vibratory motion. This means of investigation is all the more valuable on account of the difficulties in the way of direct inquiry into the phenomena of sound. We may decide the necessity of the atmospheric medium for the transmission of sonorous vibrations; and we may conceive of the possibility of determining by experiment the duration of the propagation, in the air, and then through other media; but the general laws of the vibrations of sonorous bodies escape immediate observation. We should know almost nothing of the whole case if the mathematical theory did not come in to connect the different phenomena of sound, enabling us to substitute for direct observation an equivalent examination of more favorable cases subjected to the same law. For instance, when the analysis of the problem of vibrating chords has shown us that, other things being equal, the number of oscillations is hi inverse proportion to the length of the chord, we see that the most rapid vibrations of a very short chord may be counted, since the law enables us to direct our attention to very slow vibrations. The same substitution is at our command in many cases in which it is less direct.”

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) French philosopher

Bk. 3, chap. 4; as cited in: Moritz (1914, 240)
System of positive polity (1852)

Law, Way, Mathematics, Question

“People here are always asking me, "Can you play 'Lips Like Sugar' on an acoustic guitar?" And I'm like, "No!" It was an OK song, I suppose, but it didn't sound like us. We just got sucked into a new mentality on that last album, the sound of Radio America. It did great here, but by then I just thought we weren't good enough any more. It was pretty happening, the States was building and building but it didn't feel good on stage. We weren't really communicating as mates and stuff. I mean, I was used to believing that we were the best group going.”

Ian McCulloch (1959) singer, musician

Describing what American's always ask him.
Q magazine (1992)

People, Feeling, Communication

“There is a constant succession of books on the subject of comparative grammar, for the use both of students and of the general public; yet it does not seem that we are offered what we really need. Language is full of lessons for those who know how to question it. Through all the centuries humanity has deposited in Language the acquisitions of material and moral life. But it must be approached from the side on which it appeals to the mind. If we limit ourselves to the changes of vowels and consonants, the study is reduced to the proportions of a merely secondary branch of acoustics and physiology; if we think it enough to enumerate the losses undergone *by the machinery of grammar, we give the impression of a building that is falling into ruins; if we confine ourselves to vague theories on the origin of Language, we merely add an unprofitable chapter to the history of systems.”

Michel Bréal (1832–1915) French philologist

Source: Essai de semantique, 1897, p. 1; lead paragraph

Life, Books, History, Question

“Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Tears and Saints (1937)

God, Music

“On electronic music: "The source is electronic, but what you do with it is the same as with acoustic instruments. Sound is sound and vibration is vibration, whether from an electronic source or an acoustic instrument.”

Vangelis (1943) Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, pop rock, and orchestral music

The way we use these sources is the key in order to define the required musical result. Without neglecting the acoustic conventional instruments, I spend a fair amount of time dealing with the electronic sources of sound. But please do not think computers! Computers are extremely helpful and amazing for a multitude of scientific areas, but for me, when it comes to creation, they are insufficient and slow. Therefore all of my efforts are to stay away from that beast".
2012

“(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.”

Julio Cortázar book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Source: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Memory

“We have traveled through space and time. We have been many places. Visited many worlds. And there is good news: the acoustics everywhere are terrific.”

Libba Bray Going Bovine

Source: Going Bovine

World, Travel, Time

“The faithful say that with such a mouth did God speak to the Church Fathers. The acoustics are so remarkable that if the name of the Lord is whispered at the altar it can be heard as a shout at the door.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

God, Faith

“I made, for a London television company a programme called 26 Bathrooms … which was about the ways in which people behaved in their bathrooms. It was about where people put the soap on one level, or the colour of the bathroom curtains, the acoustics, about whether you sang in the bath, and it was structured very simply on the alphabet. We had a man and a woman who arrived one by bus, one by bike, to come and demonstrate for me, in front of the camera, how a jacuzzi operated. I asked both of them to take their clothes off because obviously you don't get into a bath with your clothes on. They hesitate, but eventually their dressing gowns came off and they got into the bath. They had never met one another before. Six weeks later I got an invitation from these people that I had brought together so peculiarly in this jacuzzi -- they were planning to get married! I understand that now they have three children.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From an interview in Art and Design, no. 49
Interviews

Children, People, Way, Understanding

“The art most significantly affected by radio was music, since it was abolished the acoustic or mechanical limitations on the range of sounds. Music, the last of the arts to break out of the bodily prison that confines oral communication, had already entered the era of mechanical production before 1914 with the gramophone, although this was hardly yet within reach of the masses”

Eric Hobsbawm book The Age of Extremes

The Arts 1914-1945
The Age of Extremes (1992)

Art, Music, Communication

“Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space…it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 13

“For professional musicians, musicologists, and serious students, knowledge of the psychology of music is extremely valuable but sometimes hard to come by. In this practical and authoritative study which pulls together information from musicology, physics, physiology, psychology, and aesthetics the distinguished Hungarian psychologist Geza Revesz (1878 1955) offers a comprehensive view of the subject, including an overview of his own extensive, often revolutionary research in both music psychology and acoustics.”

Géza Révész (1878–1955) Hungarian psychologist and musicologist

Géza Révész, Introduction to the psychology of music. Courier Corporation, 1954. Abstract

Music, Knowledge, Study

“Since I was a child, I’ve used my imagination to escape from life. At the same time, my imagination has plagued me with both reality-based anxieties as well as anxieties based entirely in the imagination, such as the fear of Hell I was taught to have by the Catholic Church. Paired with a talent for literary composition, a talent that it took me over ten years to refine, I became a writer of horror stories. To my mind, writing is the most important form of human expression, not only artistic writing but also philosophical writing, critical writing, etc. Art as such, especially programmatic music such as operas, seems trivial to me by comparison, however much pleasure we may get from it. Writing is the most effective way to express and confront the full range of the realities of life. I can honestly say that the primary stature I attach to writing is not self-serving. I’ve been captivated to some degree by all forms of creativity and expression—the visual arts, film, design of any sort, and especially music. In college I veered from literature to music for a few years, which is the main reason it took me six years to get an undergraduate degree in liberal arts. I’ve loved music for as long as I can remember. Since my instrument is the guitar, I know every form and style in its history and have written the classical, acoustic, and electric forms of this instrument. I think because I have had such a love and understanding of music do I realize, to my grief, its limitations. Writing is less limited in the consolations it offers to those who have lost a great deal in their lives. And it continues to console until practically everything in a person’s life has been lost. Words and what they express have the best chance of returning the baneful stare of life.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

Wonderbook Interview with Thomas Ligotti http://wonderbooknow.com/interviews/thomas-ligotti/

Love, Life, Pleasure, Fear

“Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 44

Problem, Science

“The Blues is an acoustic tear.”

Avner Strauss (1954) Israeli musician

on his Album "Blues Haor Haganuz"

Tear

“I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

1952, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812
1950s

Music, Way, Imagination, Idea

“'Live for Loving You' is a kind of song that really can live in many different genres. And, of course, when you do your live performances the first time that you perform a song you want to stay true to the record: because tha's what people want to hear, they want to hear the hit. But then after you have done it fifty thousand times and through many, many different tours, you start experimenting and doing stuff to surprise people. So, the cut that we are doing here for the "iTunes Orginal" is something that we love to do -- because we just took it and really broke it down to a Samba. You know, the Brazilians have an amazing edge -- percussively, I think -- they have amazing rhythms. And this song really fit that rhythm very nicely. So, we wanted to do it acoustically and really cool -- and like we've done many times on tour. Just break it down to just acoustic, no synths and things of that nature: just make it organic. And I love that song for that reason: because you could perform it with just a couple of bongos and some vocals if you had to. And it would still work.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

iTunes interview (released June 2, 2007)
2007, 2008

Love, People, Nature, Thinking

“Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 14

“Somebody will ask those of us who compose with the aid of computers: 'So you make all these decisions for the computer or the electronic medium but wouldn't you like to have a performer who makes certain other decisions?' Many composers don't mind collaborating with the performer with regards to decisions of tempo, or rhythm, or dynamics, or timbre, but ask them if they would allow the performer to make decisions with regard to pitch and the answer will be 'Pitches you don't change.' Some of us feel the same way in regard to the other musical aspects that are traditionally considered secondary, but which we consider fundamental. As for the future of electronic music, it seems quite obvious to me that its unique resources guarantee its use, because it has shifted the boundaries of music away from the limitations of the acoustical instrument, of the performer's coordinating capabilities, to the almost infinite limitations of the electronic instrument. The new limitations are the human ones of perception.”

Milton Babbitt (1916–2011) American composer

Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812.

Music, Way, Feeling, Quotes

“Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 225

Time

“A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of values.”

Ferdinand de Saussure book Course in General Linguistics

Source: Cours de linguistique générale (1916), p. 120

Idea

“The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Variant: Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 13)
Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 13

World

“When Coleridge said that all men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians, he was saying that all men tend to be either acoustic or visual in their sensory bias.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 113

Men

“Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)

“Speech is an acoustic reality, writing a visual one. Performance of the former has been perfected through a million years of natural selection in the evolutionary process. The latter is a trick which we began to learn only yesterday (in terms of evolutionary time). To "hear" language (and to "say" it) is programmed in our genes; to "see" it (and "read" it) is not.”

Eric A. Havelock (1903–1988) 1903-1988, British classical philologist

"Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet" in Sino-Platonic Papers, 5 (December 1987)

Nature, Reality, Learning, Time

“When we attempt to understand the inmost nature of the outer world, we stand before it as before absolute darkness. There probably exists in nature, outside of ourselves, neither colour, odour, force, resistance, space, nor anything that we know as sensation. Light is produced by the excitement of the optic nerve, and it shines only in our brain; as to the excitement itself, there is nothing to prove that it is luminous; outside of us is profound darkness, or even worse, since darkness is the correlation of light. In the same way, all the sonorous excitements which assail us, the creakings of machines, the sounds of nature, the words and cries of our fellows are produced by excitements of our acoustic nerve; it is in our brain that noise is produced, outside there reigns a dead silence. The same may be said of all our other senses.

...In short, our nervous system, which enables us to communicate with objects, prevents us, on the other hand, from knowing their nature. It is an organ of relation with the outer world; it is also, for us, a cause of isolation. We never go outside ourselves. We are walled in. And all we can say of matter and of the outer world is, that it is revealed to us solely by the sensations it affords us, that it is the unknown cause of our sensations, the inaccessible excitant of our organs of the senses, and that the ideas we are able to form as to the nature and the properties of that excitant, are necessarily derived from our sensations, and are subjective to the same degree as those sensations themselves.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 25

World, Way, Communication, Idea

“The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 70

Universe

“.. that dizzy seething of forms and acoustic lights, rowdy and smelly [visible in the paintings at the Futurist exhibition, February 1912 in Paris].... to obtain this total painting which calls for the active cooperation of all the senses: painting of the plastic mood of the universal, you have to paint the way drunkards sing and vomit, sounds, noises and smells.”

Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) Italian painter

Quote in The painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells Carrà, in 'Lacerba' vol. 1. no. 17, 1,Florence, 1 September 1913, pp. 186-187
1910's

Way, Mood, Sense, Light

“My dear Pratella, I submit to your futurist genius these new ideas, and I invite you to discuss them with me. I am not a musician, so that I have no acoustic preferences, nor works to defend. I am a futurist painter who projects on a profoundly loved art his will to renew everything. This is why, bolder than the bolder professional musician, totally unpreoccupied with my apparent incompetence, knowing that audacity gives all prerogatives and all possibilities, I have conceived the renovation of music through the Art of Noise.
Luigi Russolo
Painter
Milano, March 11, 1913.”

Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) Electronic music pioneer and Futurist painter

Source: 1910's, The Art of Noise', 1913, p. 12

Love, Art, Music, Idea

“The first song I ever wrote back then was the song that landed me the job as composer at Westwood Studios, which was remarkable for me at the time. It was basically an acoustic guitar song with electric guitar leads and keyboard strings, and raining sound effects in the background. If I had to compare it to anything, it was probably similar to an interlude Queensryche song. I never released this song before, but I've recently been thinking about re-recording it with the experience I have now and really making it sound proper. Maybe one day.”

Frank Klepacki (1974) American musician, video game music composer and sound director

Gameplay magazine

Thinking, Time

“Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 40

“The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 34

Animals

“Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 55

“It was particularly remarkable how every acoustic perception, such as the sound of a door handle or a passing automobile, became transformed into optical perceptions. Every sound generated a vividly changing image, with its own consistent form and color.”

Albert Hofmann (1906–2008) Swiss chemist

Source: LSD : My Problem Child (1980), Ch. 1 : How LSD Originated
Context: Slowly I came back from a weird, unfamiliar world to reassuring everyday reality. The horror softened and gave way to a feeling of good fortune and gratitude, the more normal perceptions and thoughts returned, and I became more confident that the danger of insanity was conclusively past.
Now, little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux. It was particularly remarkable how every acoustic perception, such as the sound of a door handle or a passing automobile, became transformed into optical perceptions. Every sound generated a vividly changing image, with its own consistent form and color.

Color, Change

“This evolution toward noise-sound is only possible today. The ear of an eighteenth century man never could have withstood the discordant intensity of some of the chords produced by our orchestras (whose performers are three times as numerous); on the other hand our ears rejoice in it, for they are attuned to modern life, rich in all sorts of noises. But our ears far from being satisfied, keep asking for bigger acoustic sensations. However, musical sound is too restricted in the variety and the quality of its tones. Music marks time in this small circle and vainly tries to create a new variety of tones... We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.”

Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) Electronic music pioneer and Futurist painter

Source: 1910's, The Art of Noise', 1913, p. 6

Music, Life, Time

“I was always into different kinds of music but just by default, I was singing and playing acoustic guitar; I didn’t know how to dance or anything. So it would take some time, over a year, for me to kind of progress into the stuff that I ended up doing later, the more Southern soul, country-rock, whatever-you-want-to-call-it kind of thing.”

Lucinda Williams (1953) American rock, folk, blues, and country music singer, songwriter and musician

On her 1980 album Happy Woman Blues in “Lucinda Williams Looks Back on Every Album She’s Ever Made” https://www.spin.com/2016/02/lucinda-williams-ghosts-of-highway-20-car-wheels-on-a-gravel-road-interview/ in Spin (2016 Feb 25)

Singing, Soul, Time, Country

“The herdist instinct is furthermore not only personal, in the sense that it clamors for a personal collectivism; it creates also a longing and desire for the visual or acoustic contemplation of identitarian or uniformistic phenomena. The true herdist, the man truly dominated by that inferior instinct, will not only rejoice in marching amongst twenty thousand uniformly clad soldiers, all stepping rhythmically in one direction, but he will find an almost equal gratification in contemplating the show from a balcony. He will not only be happy in sitting amidst two hundred other bespectacled businessmen, drinking beer and humming one chant in unison, but the aspect of a skyscraper with a thousand identical windows will probably impress him more than a picture by Botticelli or Zurbarán.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Pg 16
The Menace of the Herd (1943)

Drink, Beer, Personality, Happiness