A Slide Rule for the Study of Music and Musical Acoustics
L. F. Waddington · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1947
Musicians are seldom concerned with the mathematical background of their art, but an understanding of the underlying physical principles of music can be helpful in the study of music and in the considerations of problems related to musical instrument design. Musical data and numerical standards of the physics of music are readily adaptable to slide-rule presentation, since they involve relationships which are the same for any key. This rule adjusts relative vibration rates, degrees of scale, intervals, chord structures, scale indications, and transposition data, against a base of the piano keyboard. It employs and relates several standard systems of frequency level specification.