Reviews for Sonic Design: The Nature of Sound and Music

Robert Cogan and Pozzi Escot's award winning book, first published by Prentice-Hall in 1976, is now available in its third paperback printing.

"The development of such a comprehensive view has long been a need. Fascinating to read, stimulating imaginatively."
Elliott Carter, New York
"The impression is really overwhelming, beyond expectations. I think it will be recognized as one of the most important books on music in our time."
Philipp Jarnach, Director-Hochschule fur Musik und darstellende Kunst-Hamburg, Germany
"Combines the most important theoretical insights of this century; beautifully conceived."
Richard Swift, Journal of Music Theory
"What the authors have achieved is quite extraordinary and no doubt took a lot of courage on their part since the approach is so radically different from almost anything else that has been going on."
Paul McIntyre, Head-Music Dept., University of Windsor, Ontario
"Exactly the book I have been waiting for."
Tsunenori Okamoto, Tohogakuen School, Tokyo
"It presents a remarkable synthesis of the elements of the evolution of music, supported by many analysis of works belonging to all periods, styles; done with a sense of method which is seldom found in this kind of work. All the newest methods have been well and adequately used without any pedantry and with pedagogy always in mind. In my opinion, all students in secondary schools, classes of music history, musical analysis at conservatories, and universities should make use of it with greatest profit. Nothing similar exists."
Marc Honegger, Director-Institute of Musicology, University of Strasbourg, France
"A million thanks for its million stimulations!"
Milton Babbitt, Princeton University
"I think it is a terrific book. I have read it with unflagging interest, I have learned a hell of a lot from it, and I admire extravagantly some - no, all - the ingenious ways you have found for stating/explaining complex things clearly, also for dealing separately, in analysis, with separable parameters but without tearing apart the musical idea and for - ultimately - reintegrating everything."
Wiley Hitchcock, Director-Institute for Studies in American Music, Brooklyn College
"It is an extraordinary book and a welcome new insight into the ways of music."
Grant Beglarian, Dean-School of Performing Arts, Univ. of Southern California
"This excellent and pioneer work on world music seeks to develop a comprehensive view in which all musics, as well as the concepts that illuminate each one, are brought together in one theoretical framework. The authors present detailed and extremely well devised analyses...exceptionally illuminating and quite convincingly... Because of its lucid and carefully organized presentation on the one hand and its solid scholarship and abundant examples on the other, this book should be of particular value to students near the start of their theoretical study as well as to more advanced readers. It is also pertinent to courses in music acoustics, composition, analysis, Medieval and Renaissance music, contemporary music, orchestration, and electronic music. Appendixes present further information of the psychophysics of sound, the raga systems of India, and extended concepts of tonal music. This is a first-rate and original piece of work to which writers of subsequent theoretical texts on world musics may turn with profit and with pleasure."
David Ahlstrom, Music Educators Journal
The Ch'in section shows that you have said exactly what I had long felt about Ch'in music."
Rulan Chao Pian, Asian Studies at Harvard University