This guide is for an instructor putting the book on a fifteen-week calendar. The chapters are titled by subject rather than by week, so that the book survives a change of syllabus, but they were sized for one week each and the mapping below is the straightforward one.
Suggested Fifteen-Week Pacing¶
| Week | Assign | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chapter 1, all sections | Establish what sound is, and get simple harmonic motion in hand as the model vibration. |
| 2 | Chapter 2, all sections | Turn a local vibration into a traveling wave; fix and the speed of sound. |
| 3 | Chapter 3, all sections | Superposition, then the standing wave: the single most important idea in the book. |
| 4 | Chapter 4, all sections | Resonance and normal modes; why an instrument responds to some frequencies and not others. |
| 5 | Chapter 5, all sections | Fourier analysis and timbre. The hinge of the course: everything after this uses spectra. |
| 6 | Chapter 6, all sections | The ear as a mechanical and neural instrument. |
| 7 | Chapter 7, all sections | Decibels and loudness. The one week with sustained arithmetic; budget problem time. |
| 8 | Chapter 8, all sections | Pitch, beats, and where consonance comes from: the bridge into tuning. |
| 9 | Chapter 9, all sections | Tuning systems. Follows directly from Week 8 and should not be separated from it. |
| 10 | Chapter 10, all sections | Strings: the family whose physics the course has already built. |
| 11 | Chapter 11, all sections | Winds and air columns. |
| 12 | Chapter 12, all sections | Percussion, and the first inharmonic spectra in the book. |
| 13 | Chapter 13, all sections | The voice, as an application of source–filter thinking. |
| 14 | Chapter 14, all sections | Room acoustics; what happens to the sound after it leaves the instrument. |
| 15 | Chapter 15, all sections; project presentations | Recording and synthesis, and the final projects. |
Dependencies¶
Most chapters depend only on what came before, but four dependencies are strong enough to be worth naming, because breaking them costs more than it saves:
Chapter 5 depends on Chapter 3. Fourier analysis is standing waves counted up; a class that has not seen the harmonic series of a string will take the spectrum on faith.
Chapter 9 depends on Chapter 8. Tuning systems are an answer to a question , why do simple ratios sound good?, that Chapter 8 asks. Taught first, they are arithmetic without motivation.
Chapters 10–13 all depend on Chapter 5. Every instrument chapter is an argument about a spectrum.
Chapter 14 depends on Chapter 7. Reverberation time is a statement about decay in decibels.
Chapters 6 and 7 can be swapped. Chapter 2’s Doppler section is used nowhere else and can be cut without consequence.
A Ten-Week Version¶
If the term is shorter, the following keeps the spine intact:
| Week | Assign |
|---|---|
| 1 | Chapter 1; Chapter 2, §§2.1–2.3 |
| 2 | Chapter 3, all sections |
| 3 | Chapter 4, §§4.1–4.3, 4.5 |
| 4 | Chapter 5, all sections |
| 5 | Chapter 6, §§6.2–6.4; Chapter 7, §§7.1–7.3 |
| 6 | Chapter 7, §§7.4–7.5; Chapter 8, §§8.1–8.3 |
| 7 | Chapter 8, §8.4; Chapter 9, all sections |
| 8 | Chapter 10, all sections |
| 9 | Chapter 11, §§11.1–11.5; Chapter 12, §§12.1–12.3 |
| 10 | Chapter 13, §§13.1–13.3; Chapter 14, §§14.1–14.2 |
What To Trim First¶
If the term gets tight, the best places to compress, in order:
§2.5, the Doppler effect. Standard, enjoyable, and used nowhere later.
§9.4, meantone and the well temperaments. The Pythagorean comma and equal temperament carry the argument; the historical middle can be a reading.
§12.4–12.5, plates, bells, and tuning the inharmonic. Chapter 12 makes its point with bars and membranes alone.
§15.4–15.6. Chapter 15 works as a two-session survey of microphones and digital audio.
Chapter 6’s §6.1 and §6.5. The impedance-matching argument in §6.2 and the place principle in §6.3–6.4 are what Chapters 7 and 8 need.
Do not trim Chapter 5, and do not trim Chapter 3’s treatment of standing waves. Everything else in the book leans on them.
The Laboratory and the Project¶
Laboratory Exercises holds measurements that can be run as scheduled lab sessions or assigned as take-home work with a phone. Each is keyed to the week it supports; the natural schedule runs them in Weeks 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, and 11.
The Final Project is designed to be assigned in Week 3 or 4, with a proposal due around Week 7 and presentations in Week 15. It carries the course’s communication outcome, and it needs that much lead time because the hardest part, finding a question that can actually be measured, is the part students most reliably underestimate.
On Assessment¶
The problem sets are the obvious assessment, but two of the stated learning outcomes are not reachable through them. Collecting and interpreting experimental data is assessed by the laboratory write-ups; explaining physics to a non-specialist is assessed by the project presentation, and it is worth saying explicitly in the rubric that a technically correct talk which loses its audience has not met the outcome.