Science and music / [by Sir James Jeans].

  • Jeans, James, 1877-1946.
Date:
1947
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Science and music / [by Sir James Jeans]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    yet a listener may hear one a twentieth of a second later than the other. Now a twentieth of a second is not a negligible quantity in the performance of music; at J= 152, it is the duration of a and a time-lag of this amount may reduce a trill or a rapid passage to an unintelligible blur of discordant sounds. For this reason instruments which will sound together in an orchestra should be placed in as close a physical proximity as is possible, and the organist should think well before coupling two manuals of which the pipes stand far apart. So long as a sound is not too loud, its speed of travel is the same for all intensities. Very violent noises, such as explo¬ sions and gunfire, are found to travel considerably faster than the quieter sounds of music, but we are not con¬ cerned with these in the present book. Also the speed of travel is the same for musical sounds of all pitches—when music is played at a distance, the different notes reach us precisely in the order in which they are played; a chord remains a chord, and does not spread out into an arpeggio, as it would if there were any tendency for notes of high or low pitch to scramble in front or lag behind the notes of medium pitch. These two facts are of great importance to music. If there were any tendency for loud notes or soft notes, high notes or low notes, to travel faster or slower than others, all music would be reduced to chaos before it reached the listener.