Marine Mammals and Noise Review

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(More customer reviews)This is and excellent book for the researcher, graduate student, or undergrad (with some physics under his or her belt), who wants to learn about the effects of underwater noise on marine mammals. Currently this topic is the focus of much interest and is one of the most active areas of marine mammology research. Richardson et al. do an excellent job explaining the technical information, and have organized the book chapters in a logical sequence. Most terms are explicitly defined and the use of technical jargon is kept to a minimum. This book is a must for any researcher, or student, in the field.

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Introduction To Sound: Acoustics for the Hearing and Speech Sciences (Singular Textbook Series) Review

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(More customer reviews)A bit of a challenge to read at times, but great for use as a reference. Covers more than the basics of sound transmission and all the associated physical science. Concepts are clearly and thoroughly explained. If you like the hard facts all the math you could ever hope to have is here - and if you don't like the math it's easy to ignore without losing the message. I'm glad to have the book and equally glad it wasn't my required text for Hearing Science.

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This powerful text continues with the same fundamental aim as the previous two editions to not present, but to teach the fundamental concepts of acoustics to students in the speech-language and hearing science. In addition to relocating revised practice problems and answers to a newly created Course Notes and Workbook for Introduction to Sound, the third edition also introduces new features.SupplementsCourse Notes and Workshop for Introduction to Sound 1-56593-980-8 - 176 pages, softcover, 8 1/2 x 11

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Signals and Systems for Speech and Hearing, 2nd edition Review

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(More customer reviews)If you read this book, it should be somewhere after the first but not much beyond the second or third work you tackle on acoustic phonetics. If you read it too early, you probably won't get what is meant by 'systems' in this context, or their relevance to acoustic phonetics and speech processing; if you read it too late, you will have already learned most of the material elsewhere.
Topics covered in this volume include: properties of sinusoid waves; LTI (linear time-invariant) systems; amplitude responses; frequency, period, and phase (this book offers greater coverage of phase than most books of its kind); the dB scale; systems that filter sound signals, like the ear and the vocal tract; spectra and spectrograms; and digitization of signals: quantization, sampling, aliasing, and reconversion to analogue.
This book is not an introduction to acoustic phonetics, and it does not go into great detail on any one topic; it attempts, rather, to provide reader-friendly technical background on many of the central concepts and tools of acoustic phonetics to non-engineering types, and to help the reader feel more comfortable with them. There are exercises at the end of each chapter which I generally found more difficult than mastering the chapter content, but they are useful in determining how well you grasped the material.
I wouldn't call this book an absolute must-read, but it's a leisurely way to review key concepts of acoustic phonetics and pick up a few new ones on the way.

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This novel book introduces speech and hearing sciences students to the principles of "signal" and "system" analysis. Beginning with an examination of what signals and systems are, the book develops a thorough background from which many of the most important issues in speech and hearing can be tackled. Numerous illustrationKey Features* The first dedicated text on this subject* Presents techniques for speech and hearing analysis and experiments* Contains minimal mathematics in describing a highly technical field* An introductory text for students in speech, hearing and psychology

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The Acoustics of Speech Communication: Fundamentals, Speech Perception Theory, and Technology Review

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(More customer reviews)A great deal of well-organized, well-presented information regarding the nature of speech, including many spectrograms with formant tracks. The review of speech perception theory is also well done. The technology is treated in only the final chapter, and definitely qualifies as an overview. The only glaring omission is no description whatsoever of the human auditory mechanism. Nevertheless, the book suited my purposes well.

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This is the only book to relate all three of the currently interactive areas of speech science-acoustic phonetics, speech perception, and speech technology.The book presents a gradual course, starting with a clear tutorial approach to basic speech then leading to speech perception research, the various theories of speech perception, and the modern speech technologies of computer synthesis and recognition of speech messages.The aim is to bring the reader through basic acoustics, spectrum analysis, vowel and consonant acoustics, and into the research literature of speech perception technology.The basic acoustic theory of speech production, the Source-Filter Theory, is clarified via text and diagrams.This knowledge is then applied to interpreting spectrograms of speech examples that sample all the phonetic distinctions among vowels and consonants.Distinctive acoustical patterns for vowel and consonant perception by listeners are summarized in detail based on the research literature.Critical discussions provide theories of motor, auditory, and computer recognition of speech.Consonant and vowel recognition by the hearing-impaired is described in relation to acoustic phonetic distinctions.Techniques of speech synthesis, recognition analysis by machines, and speech technologies are thoroughly explained.Anyone interested in speech acoustics, acoustic phonetics, speech and hearing science, psychoacoustics, and speech perception at any level.

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Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination Review

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(More customer reviews)It is interesting to read the previous reviews of this book; so many people seem to have ignored the author's explicit caveats that he is mostly discussing Western cultivated music 1) because that is the music he is most familiar with, 2) because that is the music most researched with regard to his topic of brain response, and 3) because Westerners do not have adequate vocabulary or understanding of other musical endeavors, such as the polyrhythms of Western African music. He is very clear that some African music has a long tradition of developing rhythm in its performances, rhythm that Western art music has virtually ignored in favor of certain types of harmonic and structural inventions. Because he sets out his perspective so clearly, I don't find it fair to criticize the author for not providing what a reader might hope for in a book.
The writing is well-constructed; the author uses everyday language to describe complex and scientific information. His use of the Pink Panther theme as an example for the various topics is a helpful one. He does provide a great level of detail about brain function, the science of sound, perceptual processes, and other expert facts that can overwhelm the reader. He also seems to get lost in the forest of science at the expense of the phenomenological experience of enjoying music. There is, in fact, little discussion of the ecstasy in the title. There is far more Brain than Music or Ecstasy in this volume. It is, nevertheless, a well-written book that serves as a condensation of past writings on the topic and an invitation for further explorations of human reactions to music.

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