Architecture and Color by Waldron Faulkner (review)

Books 85 employment and their transformation from mechanisms with primitive cog-wheelsintomicro-miniaturizedelectronic circuit systems-and on the simultaneous development of cybernetics and information theory. This book is especially noteworthy for its photographic historical record of surprising completeness. The texts to the illustrations are concise and limited to historical facts. Among the diverse items included are a letter from the philosopher Charles S. Peirce that contains the first known description of a switching circuit designed to solve problems of logic, Percival Lowell’s calculations for a Planet X beyond Neptune, Wassily Leontief’s first input-output chart, Leonard0 Torres’s chess-playing machine, B. F. Skinner’s World War I1 schema to use three pigeons to guide a bomb by pecking at an image of a target and a page of the first program written for a modern computer. The book is based on an InternationalBusiness Machines (IBM) exhibition that was designed to show to the public the creative moments and the social effects of computer and communications technology. Charles and Ray Eames, experts on the presentation of visual documentation on these subjects, are to be complimented on their fine book. Seeing Sound. Winston E. Kock. Wiley-Interscience, New York, 1971. 93 pp., illus. $7.95. Reviewed by Richard I. Land* This is a collection of informal reports on experimental work performed by the author during his distinguished career, primarily at Bell Telephone Laboratories and at Bendix Research Laboratories. The phenomena discussed are ways that sound may be transformed into an image. The preface correctly emphasizes that by having a visual pattern, we may often understand more about the sound being investigated. In the case of speech, the image does enhance analysis but the peculiar observation is never offered that the sound-images of words cannot be consistently ‘read’ for meaning where the ear easily leads to the discernment of meaning in speech sounds. The lack of this observation is more notable since two chapters are devoted to speech spectrograms (images where voice frequencies are represented vertically, intensity represented by darkness of markings and the duration spread laterally). It is not clear for whom this book was intended. A scientifically inclined secondary school student could get many interesting ideas for experiments. The pictures are plentiful, nicely integrated with the text, and often clearer than the related text. The approach throughout is from the experimental and hardware view, almost as though the author was handling the equipment as he explains what is being seen. As a general introduction to acoustics, this book makes many fundamental aspects quite clear and covers a broad range of applications. I am sure that the minor flaw in the first line of Chapter I will not trouble most readers, for sound is not ‘created whenever something moves’ but only when vibration is involved-things can move silently. Following an introduction to the dimensions of sound, a simple way of making images of any steady field of sound is shown and clearly discussed. Sound ‘lenses’ and guided sound energy arevividly demonstrated, as are other opticaltype features of sound transmission. Sound spectrograms are given for natural speech and synthesizer outputs, along with many other fascinating sound sources. The challenges of music synthesis are briefly mentioned. The concluding chapter touches on significant aspects of noise, introduces acountical holograms and indicates clever applications for using the images from sound, including the transmission of pictures themselves-which is a fundamentally different process. There are no indications in the book for artistic usage but that does not mean that an imaginative artist could not get fruitful ideas from it. Unfortunately, there are no *10 Trapelo Road, Belmont, MA 02178, U.S.A. references or a bibliography. Some of the images available in the book are especially exciting for a scientist and most of them are totally unknown to artists. The friendly character of the book and its broad coverage make for a reader an enjoyable experience. Architecture and Color. Waldron Faulkner. John Wiley, Chichester, England, and New York, 1972. 146 pp., illus. f6.65. Reviewed by George A. Agoston** The author states: ‘ ...I have come to the conclusion that architects might profit greatly from learning what science can teach them in the...