John Graham Backus (April 29, 1911 – October 28, 1988) was a Lithuanian American physicist and acoustician.
John Backus was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, where he studied at Reed College, receiving a BA in 1932. He went on to graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he did research in nuclear physics at the Radiation Laboratory under Ernest Lawrence. He received an MA in 1936, and a PhD in 1940. In 1945 he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Southern California, a post he retained until his retirement in 1980. During the early part of his career, his research focussed on gaseous discharges in strong magnetic fields. He was also a musician, trained as a performer on piano, bassoon, clarinet and other woodwinds and received the degree of MMus in conducting from the University of Southern California in 1959. In his later career he turned increasingly to the study of musical acoustics, particularly those of wind instruments and organ pipes. In 1969 he published The Acoustical Foundations of Music, a book which became a standard text for introductory courses in musical acoustics. A second edition appeared in 1977. He received the Silver Medal of the Acoustical Society of America in 1986. [1] Backus died in Los Angeles in 1988.
John Backus was a Renaissance man who in addition to music and physics was a highly skilled mountaineer. The Sierra Club's Hundred Peaks Section List contains approximately 275 summits, and John was the first person to ascend every mountain on the list six times. [2] He was also the first person to lead every peak on the list, [3] among his many hiking and climbing accomplishments.
Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician while someone working in the field of acoustics technology may be called an acoustical engineer. The application of acoustics is present in almost all aspects of modern society with the most obvious being the audio and noise control industries.
The Hollywood Bowl is an amphitheatre and public park in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, California, United States. It was named one of the 10 best live music venues in the United States by Rolling Stone magazine in 2018. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2023.
The Walt Disney Concert Hall at 111 South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, California, is the fourth hall of the Los Angeles Music Center and was designed by Frank Gehry. It was opened on October 23, 2003. Bounded by Hope Street, Grand Avenue, and 1st and 2nd Streets, it seats 2,265 people and serves, among other purposes, as the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. The hall is a compromise between a vineyard-style seating configuration, like the Berliner Philharmonie by Hans Scharoun, and a classical shoebox design like the Vienna Musikverein or the Boston Symphony Hall.
Max Vernon Mathews was an American pioneer of computer music.
Wallace Clement Sabine was an American physicist who founded the field of architectural acoustics. Sabine was the architectural acoustician of Boston's Symphony Hall, widely considered one of the two or three best concert halls in the world for its acoustics.
The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is an international scientific society founded in 1929 dedicated to generating, disseminating and promoting the knowledge of acoustics and its practical applications. The Society is primarily a voluntary organization of about 7500 members and attracts the interest, commitment, and service of many professionals.
Owens Peak is the highest point in the southern Sierra Nevada, at more than 8,400 feet (2,600 m) above sea level. The peak stands near the center of the Owens Peak Wilderness, which was designated by the United States Congress in 1994, and it now has a total of 74,060 acres (299.7 km2). The eastern watershed of Owens Peak is composed of three main canyons: Grapevine Canyon, Short Canyon, and Indian Wells Canyon. The Sierra Nevada meets the Great Basin and the Mojave Desert here, creating an unusual ecosystem.
Leo Leroy Beranek was an American acoustics expert, former MIT professor, and a founder and former president of Bolt, Beranek and Newman. He authored Acoustics, considered a classic textbook in this field, and its updated and extended version published in 2012 under the title Acoustics: Sound Fields and Transducers. He was also an expert in the design and evaluation of concert halls and opera houses, and authored the classic textbook Music, Acoustics, and Architecture, revised and extended in 2004 under the title Concert Halls and Opera Houses: Music, Acoustics, and Architecture.
Willis Linn Jepson was an early California botanist, conservationist, and writer.
Vern Oliver Knudsen was an American acoustical physicist.
The ASA Silver Medal is an award presented by the Acoustical Society of America to individuals, without age limitation, for contributions to the advancement of science, engineering, or human welfare through the application of acoustic principles or through research accomplishments in acoustics. The medal is awarded in a number of categories depending on the technical committee responsible for making the nomination.
Frederick Vinton Hunt was an inventor, a scientist and a professor at Harvard University who worked in the field of acoustic engineering.
Robert Bruce Lindsay was an American physicist and physics professor, known for his prolific authorship of physics books in acoustics, and historical and philosophical analyses of physics.
University Peak is a thirteener in the Sierra Nevada. It is named for the University of California. It is on the Sierra crest between Mount Gould to the north, and Mount Bradley to the south. It lies on the boundary between Tulare County and Inyo County. Its west side is in Kings Canyon National Park while the east face is in the John Muir Wilderness.
Gareth Loy is an American author, composer, musician and mathematician. Loy is the author of the two volume series about the intersection of music and mathematics titled Musimathics. Loy was an early practitioner of music synthesis at Stanford, and wrote the first software compiler for the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer. More recently, Loy has published the freeware music programming language Musimat, designed specifically for subjects covered in Musimathics, available as a free download. Although Musimathics was first published in 2006 and 2007, the series continues to evolve with updates by the author and publishers. The texts are being used in numerous mathematics and music classes at both the graduate and undergraduate level, with more current reviews noting that the originally targeted academic distribution is now reaching a much wider audience. Music synthesis pioneer Max Mathews stated that Loy's books are a "guided tour-de-force of the mathematics of physics and music... Loy has always been a brilliantly clear writer. In Musimathics, he is also an encyclopedic writer. He covers everything needed to understand existing music and musical instruments, or to create new music or new instruments. Loy's book and John R. Pierce's famous The Science of Musical Sound belong on everyone's bookshelf, and the rest of the shelf can be empty." John Chowning states, in regard to Nekyia and the Samson Box, "After completing the software, Loy composed Nekyia, a beautiful and powerful composition in four channels that fully exploited the capabilities of the Samson Box. As an integral part of the community, Loy has paid back many times over all that he learned, by conceiving the (Samson) system with maximal generality such that it could be used for research projects in psychoacoustics as well as for hundreds of compositions by a host of composers having diverse compositional strategies."
The Hundred Peaks Section (HPS) is a mountaineering society within the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club that serves to provide mountaineering activities for Sierra Club members in the southern Sierra Nevada, the Transverse Ranges, and the Peninsular Ranges, and to honor mountaineers who have summited peaks in those mountain ranges.
Robert Thomas Beyer was an American physicist, best known for his work in acoustics, and for his translations of Russian and German physics books and journals into English.
Joe Wolfe is an Australian physicist, composer and professor at University of New South Wales Sydney.
Duane Torrance "Mac" McRuer was a scientist, engineer, and expert in aircraft flight and other vehicle controls who cofounded Systems Technology Inc. in 1957. He made many contributions to the theory and practical application of human-machine interaction and control.
Floyd Rowe Watson was an American experimental physicist, known for his research on acoustics and the acoustical design of buildings.