F. Trendelenburg, Recent Works on Acoustics and Electroacoustics, translated under the editorship of V. V. Furduev, GTTI, Moscow–Leningrad, 1934, 96 pp., price 1 ruble 75 kopecks.

Trendelenburg’s booklet is a separate edition of a number of survey papers on acoustics and electroacoustics, published by the author in the journal Zeitschrift für Hochfrequenz und Elektroakustik in 1931 and appearing in Russian translation in the journal Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk for 1931 and 1932. The separate edition of the translation of this booklet into Russian is quite timely and especially valuable, given the poverty of our literature on acoustics. F. Trendelenburg knows the latest literature on acoustics extremely well and is able to set forth the contents of works concisely and clearly, emphasizing the most important and essential points and not burdening the exposition with details. The surveys are supplied with exhaustive references to the literature, which makes them especially valuable.

The booklet will be very useful for the numerous beginning workers in the field of technical acoustics, for teachers in higher educational institutions, and for students. Of course, in the last few years, since the time it was written, many important works have appeared, and thus Trendelenburg’s survey has already become somewhat obsolete. This, however, does not diminish the merit of the book, but merely points to the need for new surveys of this kind to appear.

The questions reflected in the booklet are very diverse and interesting. The author treats in detail new works on measurement acoustic technique (sound analysis, measurement of phase and amplitude of sound, measurement of power). Studies of sound emitters (loudspeakers, reproducing devices, musical instruments) and microphones are examined in detail. Much space is devoted to physiological acoustics (the physics of hearing, speech) and architectural acoustics (reverberation acoustics, sound absorption, sound insulation). The latest works on the recording and reproduction of sound are also represented rather fully (gramophone recording, sound cinema, magnetic recording).

The translation of the book, carried out under the editorship of V. V. Furduev, meets all the requirements of a good technical translation.

S. Rzhevkin