On the Sensations of Tone

What the book is about

Helmholtz set out to explain music from the physics of vibration and the physiology of the ear. He showed that the colour of a sound – its timbre – comes from the mix of harmonic partials above the fundamental, and he analysed real instruments and vowels with tuned glass resonators that now carry his name.

The book also proposed a resonance ('place') theory of hearing, in which different parts of the inner ear respond to different frequencies, and explained dissonance as roughness caused by beating partials. Ellis's English edition added long appendices on tuning systems and introduced the cent, the unit musicians still use to measure tiny pitch differences.