What the Ear Hears (And Doesn't)
Inside the Extraordinary Everyday World of Frequency
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"You'll never listen to the world the same way again. A truly ear-opening experience!" —Chris Ferrie, award-winning physicist and author of Where Did the Universe Come From? And Other Cosmic Questions
For readers of Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill O’Neill, What the Ear Hears (and Doesn’t) is a fascinating science book for adults that explores the physics principle of frequency and the (sometimes weird) role it plays in our everyday lives.
What do the world’s loneliest whale, a black hole, and twenty-three people doing Tae Bo all have in common?
In 2011, a skyscraper in South Korea began to shake uncontrollably without warning and was immediately evacuated. Was it an earthquake? An attack? No one seemed quite sure. The actual cause emerged later and is utterly fascinating: Twenty-three middle-aged folks were having a Tae Bo fitness class in the office gym on the twelfth floor. Their beats had inadvertently matched the building’s natural frequency, and this coincidence—harnessing a basic principle of physics—caused the building to shake at an alarming rate for ten minutes. Frequency is all around us, but little understood.
Musician, composer, TV presenter, and educator Richard Mainwaring uses the concept of the Infinite Piano to reveal the extraordinary world of frequency in a multitude of arenas—from medicine to religion to the environment to the paranormal—through the universality of music and a range of memorable human (and animal) stories laced with dry humor. Whether you’re science curious, musically inclined, or just want to know what a Szechuan pepper has to do with physics, What the Ear Hears (and Doesn’t) is an immensely enjoyable read filled with “did you know?” trivia you’ll love to share with friends.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Musician Mainwaring takes a deep dive into the "extraordinary world of vibration, waves, and frequency" in his zippy debut. As he writes, "from communicating where the next meal is to drumming out a courtship dance... living things rely on hertz." His tour through the auditory world sees him explain that until the 20th century, an A note could be "anything from Handel's 422 Hz to Beethoven's 455 Hz" depending on the country; that understanding frequencies enabled the development of Polaroid cameras and printers; and that the frequency of a honeybee's wings whirring is 250 Hz, which makes the note of B. He routinely ties frequencies to various pieces of popular music: Brahms's "Lullaby" helps "illustrate the pitches" of WWII air-raid sirens, for example, and the bonds that join the atoms in nitrous oxide vibrate at a frequency the same as Andy Williams's opening note of "Moon River." Though he can get a bit into the weeds ("A frequency of 5,000 Hz... will have a peak hair cell sensitivity around ten millimeters along the cochlea"), Mainwaring's well-tuned sense of humor and ample use of puns help the jargon go down. Music-minded readers won't regret tuning in.
