IN GREEK mythology, Echo was a mountain nymph who lost her voice and was condemned to repeat only the words of others. Now science is poised to silence the sprite completely. A group of physicists, ...

Imagine two people in a small room as illustrated in Fig. 16-1. The first sound of the person speaking to reach the listener is that traveling a direct path because it travels the shortest distance.

Figure 10-1 illustrates the reflection of waves from a sound source from a rigid, plane wall surface. The spherical wavefronts (solid lines) strike the wall and the reflected wavefronts (broken lines) ...