Acoustics

otherwise, being in direct or indirect contact with the vibrating body, these must necessarily also be compelled to vibrate in the same periods of time as the sounding body, insofar as it can occur by virtue of the force of the vibrating motion and the nature of the surrounding materials; and the auditory nerves, organized for the sensation of such movements, must necessarily be affected thereby, if between them and the sounding body there is a stretch of materials of any kind that are capable of vibrating along with it. Thus, even in a vacuum original: "luftleeren Raume", a sounding body, if properly set in motion, would sound just as it does in the air—that is, it would vibrate in the same periods of time, or perhaps a little faster, and assume the same changes of shape; but one would hear nothing, because between the ear and the sounding body there would be no continuous stretch of co-vibrating materials.

A very deficient and one-sided treatment of acoustics Acoustics: the branch of physics concerned with the properties of sound has also been caused particularly by the fact that people have considered only, or primarily, strings, but have paid little or no attention to other sounding bodies. Strings were, in fact, almost the only type of sounding bodies whose properties were known—though mostly only imperfectly—which is why it was believed that other sounding bodies must follow the same laws. The discoveries of the vibrations of a rod by Daniel Bernoulli and L. Euler, and of the air vibrations in a wind instrument by these same men and by La Grange, Lambert, and Riccati, have been mentioned by almost no one, and even less properly utilized, before I drew attention to them in several writings; and the properties of most other sounding bodies were first made known by me later in various individual treatises, and some for the first time here, so that one might distinguish the general properties of sounding bodies from the specific ones belonging to each individual type...