Audiotour Cabinet of Physics: Acoustics Rooms

Acoustics is the science that studies sounds, but for centuries it had remained essentially limited to the fields of music and mathematics.

Only starting from the end of the eighteenth century it became an important branch of classical physics, ending up being studied also in the fields of physiology and psychology.

One of the main issues that involved acoustics was to produce pure sounds with a well- defined frequency: because of this, tuning forks started being developed and sirens of various types were devised.

Organ pipes, powered by special bellows, were instead used to produce and study the sounds generated by oscillating air columns.

Many experiments were also made in order to precisely determine the range of frequencies perceived by the human ear.

In the nineteenth century various techniques were developed to study the sounds produced by strings, plates, and membranes (for example, the Chladni plates and the Lissajous method), eventually coming to an effective sound analysis thanks to the Helmholtz analyzer.

The registration and reproduction of sounds were possible only from the second half of the nineteenth century.

The first phonographs, graphophones or gramophones used tin sheets, wax cylinders or shellac disks in which the vibrations of a stylus connected to a diaphragm had been engraved.

In a few years, these devices were improved and became extremely popular.

The collection also includes models of human anatomy of the organs relating to this subject and also an acoustic “wave machine”, a device for reproducing wave phenomena, which allowed the various types of acoustic waves.