ABSTRACT
Let us return to the Spanish sailor that we encountered in Chapter 12. Recall that in the sixteenth century, he travels from Sevilla to Havana on a Spanish eet of galleons on its way to pick up gold from Mexico and silver from Bolivia. During one of his wanderings in Havana, he comes upon a group of black former slaves drumming and dancing passionately in the street, and is captivated by one of the crisp invigorating rhythms that one of the musicians is playing with a pair of wooden sticks. e sailor’s brain interprets a signal relayed by his ear, which in turn is stimulated by a sound wave traveling from the sticks to the ear, causing his eardrum to vibrate. is sound wave is the acoustic signal that embodies the rhythm that the musician is playing. e acoustic signal is a complex waveform that contains much information about the sound, as well as the environment in which the sound is produced, in addition to the points in time at which the sticks are struck together. However, a greatly simplied and idealized representation of this acoustic signal, a er being recorded by electronic equipment, and graphically displayed on a computer screen, might look something like the waveform in Figure 38.1 (le ). Of course, the sailor is not privy to this graphical information.
