Educational research has demonstrated that textbooks usually exhibit a certain reductionist and distorted standpoint in the presentation of some contents in physics. In searching such distortions, the present research tries to proceed a categorisation and an analysis of the physiological qualities attributed by primary and secondary school textbooks to the phenomenon of sound. In such a research we have found several conceptual distortions in the process of didactical transposition, as well as the neglect of the complexity involved in the ideas of pitch, loudness and timbre.
Textbook analysis; sound; pitch; loudness; timbre; conceptual distortions