The creation of Hearing Science with my co-author Tomasz Letowski took three years of non-stop work. Although some of the chapters were based on workbooks I had created for my hearing science classes over the past 14 years, most of this book was written from scratch and carefully crafted through many revisions and the back and forth exchange of ideas between an audiology professor (me) and an engineer (Tom). At times, it appeared that we did not speak the same language – I don’t mean the occasional middle of the night e-mails that Tom sent written in Polish – but in the vocabulary differences between audiologists and engineers. In addition, we did not always agree on the content and level of difficulty for each chapter. However, we both had the same overall goal: to produce a really solid hearing science text which would provide instructors with the tools they needed to best teach a hearing science course.
Hearing Science includes math and physics tutorial chapters to create a foundation and then goes on to present the topics of acoustics, anatomy/physiology, psychoacoustics, and audio signals. The diversity of topic areas was intended to allow instructors to take the class in a variety of different directions depending on the needs and objectives of the course. The foundation chapters can be assigned as “out of class” work for students or can be used as the introductory portion of the course, depending on the desires of the professor, the level of the course, and the abilities and background of the students. Our desire in writing this book was to reach as many students and teachers as possible on a level tailored for their needs, using a step by step process of problem solving and, wherever possible, teaching with analogy, models and figures. The focus was on delivering teaching material to students who have a limited basis in the natural sciences but not sacrificing the science behind hearing science, i.e., not “dummying down” the material. I’ve seen firsthand how frustrated students can get without a good textbook to use as a reference – and I have tried a number of different texts over the years. I hope that professors and students will find this text useful and I welcome comments, questions, and suggestions for future editions.
