Abstract

This is a study of the life and work of William Holder , English mathematician, acoustician and musician. It includes treatment of his concepts dealing with the physics of sound and his experiments relative to human hearing. Holder is acknowledged to be the first Englishman to teach a deaf person to speak. A short biography of Holder is related to England's history of the period. The research includes a comparison of Holder's theoretical work on music theory and acoustics with similar work done prior to and after his time. His theory treatise is carefully compared with a contemporary essay on music theory by Francis North Guilford. Post-17th-century authoratative sources are surveyed with documentation of the gradual accumulation of knowledge in the field of acoustics. Among the sources included in the survey are Hermann Helmholtz's research on the physics of sound and human hearing; the 20th-century work of Harvard researchers, Stanley Stevens and Hallowell Davis, on the psychology and physiology of hearing; and research done in the 1960's by Paul Boomsliter and Warren Creel on the relationship of hearing to long pattern sound waves