This first chapter sets the stage for the later technical development of Dr. Whit’s career in applied seismics. Experiments, f’wst at the Acoustics Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later at Mobil Oil and Marathon Oil, provided insight into the general problems of impedance measurements, transduction, filtering, and attenuation. These papers also serve as a bridge to show geophysicists how theft own experiments in seismology naturally interface with (indeed, arose out of) the larger world of sound measurements in air and water. These experiments demonstrate the power of geometrically constrained experiments to allow verification of approximate (and in some cases, exact) theories of sound.