Sound Within Sound: Opening Our Ears to the Twentieth Century

Product Information

Sound can propagate through a medium such as air, water and solids as longitudinal waves and also as a transverse wave in solids. The sound waves are generated by a sound source, such as the vibrating diaphragm of a stereo speaker. The sound source creates vibrations in the surrounding medium. As the source continues to vibrate the medium, the vibrations propagate away from the source at the speed of sound, thus forming the sound wave. At a fixed distance from the source, the pressure, velocity, and displacement of the medium vary in time. At an instant in time, the pressure, velocity, and displacement vary in space. The particles of the medium do not travel with the sound wave. This is intuitively obvious for a solid, and the same is true for liquids and gases (that is, the vibrations of particles in the gas or liquid transport the vibrations, while the average position of the particles over time does not change). During propagation, waves can be reflected, refracted, or attenuated by the medium. [5] Molleson has employed her expert knowledge and refined perspective in selecting which ten artists to include in what, in less discerning hands, could have been an unwieldy, daunting tome. She has chosen ‘ten beautifully messy, confounding, brave, outrageous, original and charismatic composers’. Each one of these elegantly written biographical essays describes a remarkable, singular, creative life, strewn with political, social and domestic obstacles. They describe a fierce commitment to their art, a refusal to compromise and a determination to write whatever music they pleased. They are wonderful characters, if apparently not all easy people to get along with. Sound that is perceptible by humans has frequencies from about 20Hz to 20,000Hz. In air at standard temperature and pressure, the corresponding wavelengths of sound waves range from 17m (56ft) to 17mm (0.67in). Sometimes speed and direction are combined as a velocity vector; wave number and direction are combined as a wave vector. The speed of sound depends on the medium the waves pass through, and is a fundamental property of the material. The first significant effort towards measurement of the speed of sound was made by Isaac Newton. He believed the speed of sound in a particular substance was equal to the square root of the pressure acting on it divided by its density: We see a letter Crawford Seeger sent to her brother in 1945: “all during the house-cleaning I was thinking of the books I might be working on”, she writes. She became an internationally respected transcriber and arranger of traditional songs, but didn’t write another modernist piece until 1952; she died a year later of cancer.

Transverse waves, also known as shear waves, have the additional property, polarization, and are not a characteristic of sound waves. Phonotactics comprises a wide range of rules and restrictions that govern how sounds are combined in any given language. When it comes to the English language, several common phonotactic rules come into play, delineating permissible sound sequences and syllable structures. Below are some of the key phonotactic rules in English:Sound waves are often simplified to a description in terms of sinusoidal plane waves, which are characterized by these generic properties: Despite her compositions being distinctly uncomfortable I think I might have actually enjoyed the company of Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-53). Molleson does the next best thing when, in one of the book’s most engaging chapters, she interviews Ruth’s daughter, the folk music legend Peggy Seeger, at her home in Oxford. I too have spent time with Peggy Seeger and if her mother was anything like her she would have been politely intense, single-minded but warm, charming and funny. Quite difficult to reconcile this and her family’s profound association with folk music with Ruth’s challenging, dissonant, avant-garde music. Molleson describes her as ‘wholesome, meticulous…never swore, who crocheted on the porch and read Perry Mason detective novels’, but she was also ‘a sensationally skilled composer…a pioneer of hard-hitting modernism…she composed caustic little piano pieces, blindsidingly intense songs…hers was unapologetic music that blazed a trail for a new national paradigm — or might have done, had she kept going with it’. Trouble was, domesticity, family life and a subservient marriage to a man — her teacher and a composer not nearly as gifted as her — took over and her career and influence in the world of contemporary experimental music waned. She kept composing well after her star had faded but Molleson and Peggy Seeger quite properly lament the lot of creative, talented women in a rigidly uncompromising patriarchal society.

It introduces us to thrilling dreamers from the last century who believed that music could fundamentally – and disruptively – recalibrate our lives. In Mexico, we meet Julián Carrillo, the youngest of an indigenous family of 19, who becomes a composer obsessed with the possibilities of microscopic intervals between tones (in layperson’s terms, the many tiny gradations of sound between two notes on a keyboard).

Keep up to date with your professional development

Consonant clusters: These multi-consonant patterns can occur at the onset, nucleus, or coda positions in a syllable. A complex relationship between the density and pressure of the medium. This relationship, affected by temperature, determines the speed of sound within the medium. Sound Within Sound makes us realise that there was so much more music out there by people like her, plus music that was never finished, written down or performed. It also focuses our ears on the brilliant stuff that survives, encouraging us to dig deeper and keep listening.