Usually, professionals involved in acoustics measurements need sophisticated hardware and software tools on a daily basis. This is even truer if assessments according to international standards are required. Unfortunately, these tools range in price from expensive to extremely expensive, and therefore do not enjoy widespread use. Here is where free tools and books like this one come to the rescue, by effectively showing that many measurements can be achieved with sufficient precision using freely available software tools and inexpensive hardware. This is essentially a mid-level book as far as theory is concerned and a practical guide for everyday work in the field.
The first chapter is a general introductory chapter, focusing on most common acoustic measurements’ definitions and the mathematical procedures used to extract relevant information from the acoustic data. Chapter 2 begins with an introduction to uncertainty in measurements in general, and then elaborates on how uncertainty influences basic acoustic measurements, emphasizing these measurement specifics. Chapter 3 in my personal opinion is slightly redundant, or at least could be kept much shorter, since it is not based on experience but just facts that can be obtained on the web. Chapter 4 presents one of the best free audio editing programs, Audacity. It is useful to the extent that Audacity hardly has a manual that is printer friendly.
Chapter 5 is most important, and I wish it were longer, including also radiating transducers, not exclusively microphones. Nevertheless, it is an essential chapter and has very useful insights. Chapter 6 is a succinct presentation of digital signal processing techniques that are used in virtually all modern acoustic measurement devices. Chapter 7 presents a few key acoustic quantities’ measurements and their meanings. Chapter 8 discusses at length the most revealing type of acoustic measurement, namely spectral analysis. The chapter focuses on understanding the peculiarities of Fourier transform-based results and is also one of the essential chapters in this book. The last chapter is also redundant, dealing with digital recorders. However, it has a useful section on testing for the parameters of the recorders.
There are more appendices than chapters in this book, and those are meant to make the book as self-contained as possible. I must say the author succeeds in this endeavor, provided of course that the reader has some minimum prerequisites in terms of familiarity with basic university-level mathematics.
Despite some not-very-useful chapters, this book should be recommended to students and especially practitioners with scarce access to expensive tools.
