What the book is about
Based on lectures given at the Case School of Applied Science, Miller's book is famous for its photographs of sound waves. He built the 'phonodeik', an instrument that used a tiny mirror on a diaphragm to record waveforms on moving film.
With it he compared the waveforms of flutes, violins, voices and vowels and analysed them into harmonic components – an early, mechanical version of what spectrum analysers and spectrograms do today.
Key ideas
- Recording waveforms with the phonodeik
- Harmonic analysis of instruments
- Vowel sounds
- Tone quality