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I find the tag very unclear on a site like this. It's been used on questions about physical aspects like bow length, a couple physiology questions, and several questions about sound such as this one. With such breadth, it's useless.

I also think regardless of how it could be narrowed, it will just serve to confuse users. Most don't read tag wikis so the particular meaning we assign may not be known, and even then it may be mis-applied. The definition that most readily comes to mind is "the nature and properties of matter and energy", which is again awfully broad.

I think we should remove this tag. We already have , , , and other tags that adequately categorize the questions tagged .

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I disagree. The six questions that currently have that tag are all related to the physical acoustics of sound production.

If it is being used to apply to questions expressly about physiology, then that's obviously an incorrect usage, but of those six questions, the two tagged are also about physiology in addition to physics.

Physics as it applies to music (and therefore sound) is described as acoustics. This tag didn't exist on this site until guitars.SE merged, but I think that all of the questions tagged at this time could be appropriately retagged as . If we feel that is too easily misinterpreted, then I would propose merging with and moving from there. In the meantime, I've added a tag wiki to .

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  • Ah. So I think the bow-length question is mistagged, since the question isn't asking about acoustics but the answers talk about it. I'd be happy merging it with acoustics. Let's see if there are any other ideas.
    – user28
    Jun 1, 2011 at 21:18
  • @Matthew: I agree with NReilingh. I would regret slightly a merge with acoustics because the latter is a little too restrictive in my opinion. But for most questions it would be appropriate.
    – ogerard
    Jun 2, 2011 at 22:44
  • I've made it a synonym, rather than a merge.
    – user28
    Jun 7, 2011 at 14:27
  • @Matthew: what's the difference?
    – rshallit
    Jun 7, 2011 at 20:17
  • @rshallit Synonyms make all future incidences the same. Merging makes all past instances the same and makes it much harder to find out that there are actually two tags; it's also harder to undo.
    – user28
    Jun 7, 2011 at 20:18

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