Thomas Young’s interest in music affected his scientific work throughout his career. His 1800–1803 papers interrelate musical, acoustic, and optical topics to translate the wave theory from sound to light, as does his synoptic Lectures on Natural Philosophy (1807) in justifying his discoveries to a larger audience. Returning to optics in 1817, in the aftermath of the work of Fresnel, Young grounded in musico-acoustical studies his suggestion that light may be a transverse (rather than longitudinal) wave, along with its paradoxical implications for the ether, which he discussed in 1823. Young’s decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs also rested on phonology.

The transformation of acoustics into electroacoustics in the early twentieth century was brought about by at least two significant changes in the mechanical world of acoustics. Electrical technologies entered the acoustics laboratory and profoundly changed the research practices therein. At the same time, electrodynamic theory and electric circuit design advanced rapidly to replace mechanical conceptions as the explanatory basis for the physical sciences. Equivalent-circuit diagrams facilitated a reductionist representation as well as the design of real circuits for electric generation and manipulation of sound by translating acoustic problems into electric systems. Consequently, electroacoustics became more than a research technology and evolved from a laboratory practice into a new way of thinking and talking about sound.

This paper is based around two radio-reception experiments, which both originated as research on long-wave radio and serve to illustrate, from alternate perspectives, the constitutive role that noise plays in communication. The projects of Karl Guthe Jansky and Charles Francis Jenkins opened new research perspectives. The two experiments both ensued from acoustics research, but in different ways, turning disruptive noise into material for a new scientific research approach and even going so far as to investigate any information it might contain. Philosopher Michel Serres suggested that noise, forming the basis of all communication and signal or message transmission through space, might in fact help to reconceive communication and to foster a renewal of the concept of transmission. This article traces the history of Serres’s suggestion.

This article shows how sound was used as an epistemic tool for seismological research during the Cold War, when the ability to distinguish underground nuclear explosions from natural earthquakes, the so-called detection or discrimination problem, became a critical issue of international arms control. In 1960, the psychoacoustician Sheridan Speeth created an “auditory display” for presenting seismographic records to the ear. Despite promising initial results, neither seismologists nor military officials seemed to welcome Speeth’s work. I place his efforts within a Cold War framework and show how the sounds of science can be politicized and why it is important to take into account the disciplinary and sociopolitical contexts in which research enterprises are embedded.

The cultural and the scientific history of the bell sound are linked together, and thereby the methodological premises are created to analyze cultural phenomena in terms of signal analysis. Because of the strange phenomenon that the tone after which a bell is named, the so-called strike note, cannot be found within the spectrum of the bell, the sound of a church bell can be described as the deconstruction of Western acoustic culture. In its sound the secondary precedes the primary. The primary—the fundamental tone—is projected first of all by the secondary, its harmonics. This article, which introduces (to a modest extent) media-theoretical and Lacanian terminology into the history of science discourse, argues that bells represent and signal a state of emergency in the symbolic order because they are this state of emergency in the acoustical real.

This article offers an examination of the psychophysical studies of accommodation in hearing by Ernst Mach and Max Planck, natural scientists better known for their accomplishments in physics and philosophy. Early in his career, Mach sought to experimentally locate the possible mechanism of accommodation in hearing, the phenomenon in which individuals can alter their experience of sound by changing their attention. Planck, employing a microtonal harmonium, studied the role of attention in vocalists’ abilities to hear tempered intervals—what he termed accommodation in hearing. Both mobilized music as a means of argument and experiment. This article shows how each physicist’s conception of accommodation in hearing drew on music and, in turn, informed his ideas about the historicity of hearing, the universality of the nineteenth-century Western musical aesthetic, and the nature of knowledge itself.

This article investigates the audiovisual field in some of Bruce Nauman’s early videos. Historians of science and anthropologists have pointed to the necessity of considering seeing and hearing as faculties that are acquired. I argue that media technology plays a crucial role in that process. Nauman’s videos explore the relation of perception, the human body, and media technology, bringing to the fore the extent to which this seemingly self-evident relationship is artificial and constructed. In particular, Nauman’s Violin Tuned D.E.A.D. employs techniques of musical training that emerged in the late nineteenth century from the physiology of movement and fatigue.

In order to communicate with isolated test subjects in physiological and psychological laboratories in the late nineteenth century, scholars such as Wilhelm Wundt, Edward W. Scripture, and Hendrik Zwaardemaker used modern technologies, in particular telegraphy. In a similar vein, Marcel Proust equipped his apartment with a soundproof room and a network of cables and switches in order to conduct his famous “research” on lost time. The combined use of the camera silenta and advanced communication technologies turned time experts around 1900 into spiders: without ears, eyes, or nose, they were waiting at the edge of an extended web of simultaneities for the slightest vibrations their bodies could receive. With Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, one could say that they experienced states of “organlessness.”

In the mid-nineteenth century, Hermann von Helmholtz developed a new, mathematically formalized representation of the quality of tones, which he termed musikalische Klangfarbe. He did so at the price of excluding change from this representation and from the sounds he experimented with. Later researchers and composers discovered the cognitive and aesthetic side effects of this new concept. Experimental psychologist Carl Stumpf found that stable tones veil their source; their recognition strongly depends on their characteristic beginnings and endings. Arnold Schoenberg in turn used this effect to merge the sounds of musical instruments into new orchestral colors. On the basis of a three-part case study, I argue that nineteenth-century research in perception has deeply affected twentieth-century concepts of music, bringing to the fore the aesthetic quality of experimental situations.

During the nineteenth century a major change took place in musical-instrument making. In the course of industrialization many crafts transformed into industries, and production methods changed significantly. Prompted by this development, many trained piano makers, like Siegfried Hansing, published “educational books,” in hopes of establishing a fixed canon of explicit knowledge. This canon, elucidating physics and acoustics to an audience of craftsmen (and, to a lesser extent, lay theoreticians), was intended to replace the craftsmen’s working knowledge. Despite efforts to bring explicit knowledge to industrialized musical-instrument making, the working knowledge of the craftsmen remained irreplaceable.

Until the 1870s the practice of artistic pedaling in piano performance lacked guidelines and was left largely to the whim of individual pianists. The kinship that developed between science and music, drawn largely from Hermann von Helmholtz’s experiments on musical sound, left a positive imprint on the art of pedaling. This article elucidates the contribution of Hans Schmitt by way of his acoustical analysis in Das Pedal des Claviers (1875). In conclusion the article probes Schmitt’s generative role in shaping the practice of piano pedaling. It demonstrates the potential for the collaboration of acoustics and music to enhance piano performance.

Stanford, more than most American universities, transformed in the early Cold War into a research powerhouse tied to national security priorities. The budgetary and legitimacy crises that beset the military-industrial-academic research complex in the 1960s thus struck Stanford so deeply that many feared the university itself might not survive. We argue that these crises facilitated the rise of a new kind of interdisciplinarity at Stanford, as evidenced in particular by the founding of the university’s computer music center. Focusing on the “multivocal technology” of computer music, we investigate the relationships between Stanford’s broader institutional environment and the interactions among musicians, engineers, administrators, activists, and funders in order to explain the emergence of one of the most creative and profitable loci for Stanford’s contributions to industry and the arts.

The Renaissance genre of organological treatises inventoried the forms and functions of musical instruments. This article proposes an update and expansion of the organological tradition, examining the discourses and practices surrounding both musical and scientific instruments. Drawing on examples from many periods and genres, we aim to capture instruments’ diverse ways of life. To that end we propose and describe a comparative “ethics of instruments”: an analysis of instruments’ material configurations, social and institutional locations, degrees of freedom, and teleologies. This perspective makes it possible to trace the intersecting and at times divergent histories of science and music: their shared material practices, aesthetic commitments, and attitudes toward technology, as well as their impact on understandings of human agency and the order of nature.