![August Seebeck](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/August_Seebeck.jpeg)
August Ludwig Friedrich Wilhelm Seebeck (27 December 1805 in
Jena
Jena () is a German city and the second largest city in Thuringia. Together with the nearby cities of Erfurt and Weimar, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia with approximately 500,000 inhabitants, while the city itself has a po ...
– 19 March 1849 in
Dresden
Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label= Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth ...
) was a scientist at the
Technische Universität Dresden
TU Dresden (for german: Technische Universität Dresden, abbreviated as TUD and often wrongly translated as "Dresden University of Technology") is a public research university, the largest institute of higher education in the city of Dresden, th ...
.
Seebeck is primarily remembered for his work on sound and hearing, in particular with experiments with an acoustic siren that demonstrated that the
pitch of a tone did not depend on the tone having a fundamental frequency component of the pitch frequency. His observations and theories are now highly regarded, but historically suffered in the battle with
Ohm
Ohm (symbol Ω) is a unit of electrical resistance named after Georg Ohm.
Ohm or OHM may also refer to:
People
* Georg Ohm (1789–1854), German physicist and namesake of the term ''ohm''
* Germán Ohm (born 1936), Mexican boxer
* Jörg Ohm (b ...
and
Helmholtz, who took a
Fourier analysis view of the sound of tones.
With respect to
Ohm's acoustic law, historians have concluded that Seebeck "successfully discredited the hypothesis and forced Ohm to withdraw from the field."
[
]
See also
*
Auditory science Auditory science or hearing science is a field of research and education concerning the perception of sounds by humans, animals, or machines. It is a heavily interdisciplinary field at the crossroad between acoustics, neuroscience, and psychology ...
*
Sound localization
Sound localization is a listener's ability to identify the location or origin of a detected sound in direction and distance.
The sound localization mechanisms of the mammalian auditory system have been extensively studied. The auditory system us ...
*
Temporal theory (hearing) The temporal theory of hearing states that human perception of sound depends on temporal patterns with which neurons respond to sound in the cochlea. Therefore, in this theory, the pitch of a pure tone is determined by the period of neuron firin ...
References
External links
TUD page with photo
19th-century German physicists
1805 births
1849 deaths
Auditory scientists
{{Germany-physicist-stub