Passionate yet rigorous, A History of Sound weaves science and music into a seamless narrative, showing how discoveries about sound have influenced fields as diverse as astronomy, medicine, technology, physiology, architecture — and even the art of war.

This is the astonishing story of sound: a tale of bold theories and eccentric experiments, flashes of genius and enduring mysteries. From ancient Greece to the digital age, it is a grand adventure of human ingenuity grappling with one of nature’s most enigmatic forces. 
From Pythagoras and Galileo to Athanasius Kircher and Isaac Newton, the greatest minds in history have tried to unravel the secrets of sound, sometimes with imaginative hypotheses, always pushing our knowledge forward, step by step. Along the way, they revealed the deep connection between sound and mathematics, the principles behind musical harmony, and the physical laws that govern musical instruments and human hearing. 
What exactly is sound? Why is Western music built on mathematical ratios? Why are there seven notes—and how arbitrary is that choice? Why do all melodic instruments rely on just two fundamental sound-producing mechanisms? And how is it that the human ear, still not fully understood, outperforms even the most advanced algorithms? 
Finally, the book explores how our relationship with sound has been transformed over little more than a century, from electricity to computers, from early recording devices to synthesizers, CDs and MP3s.