Related closely to the field of physical acoustics is that of psychoacoustics, which deals with the phenomena of musical hearing from a psychological and aesthetic point of view. One of the major contributors to our understanding of the subject is Fritz Winckel. When this book first appeared in German in 1960, reviewers pressed for an English translation. This Dover volume is an answer to that demand: it makes Professor "Winckel's important study generally available to English-language readers for the very first time." It has been extensively revised and updated by the author.
In his thought-provoking study, Professor Winckel applies the findings of technical researches in acoustics to the practice of music, covering many different aspects of recent psychoacoustical researches: the evaluation of loudness and the dissolution power of the car; the influence of the acoustical properties of the concert hall on the hearing process; the function of time variation and rhythm in musical perception; the evaluation of the sound spectrum including the unharmonic components. He surveys extensively the German and English literature in the field, organizing his information into chapters on stationary sound, the onset behavior of sound, the concept of space, the concept of time, the evaluation of sound through the hearing mechanism, unclarity in musical structures, simultaneously sounding tones, electroacoustic sound structure, and the effect of music on the listener.
This book should prove equally useful to acousticians, sound engineers, and others working in this area of applied physics and to composers, performers, and musicologists concerned with the technical aspects of music. Psychologists working in the field of sense perception will also find much of value here.
New translation by Thomas Binkley of the 1960 German edition of Phänomene des musikalischen Hörens, with revisions and corrections by the author.