MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 2008 PREPRINT 346 Julia Kursell (ed.) Sounds of Science – Schall im Labor (1800–1930) TABLE OF CONTENTS Introductory Remarks Julia Kursell 3 „Erzklang“ oder „missing fundamental“: Kulturgeschichte als Signalanalyse Bernhard Siegert 7 Klangfiguren (a hit in the lab) Peter Szendy 21 Sound Objects Julia Kursell 29 A Cosmos for Pianoforte d’Amore: Some Remarks on “Miniature Estrose” by Marco Stroppa Florian Hoelscher 39 The “Muscle Telephone”: The Undiscovered Start of Audification in the 1870s Florian Dombois 41 Silence in the Laboratory: The History of Soundproof Rooms Henning Schmidgen 47 Cats and People in the Psychoacoustics Lab Jonathan Sterne 63 The Resonance of “Bodiless Entities”: Some Epistemological Remarks on the Radio-Voice Wolfgang Hagen 73 VLF and Musical Aesthetics Douglas Kahn 81 Ästhetik des Signals Daniel Gethmann 89 Producing, Representing, Constructing: Towards a Media-Aesthetic Theory of Action Related to Categories of Experimental Methods Elena Ungeheuer 99 Standardizing Aesthetics: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany Myles W. Jackson 113 Introductory Remarks The following collection of papers documents the workshop “Sounds of Science – Schall im Labor, 1800 to 1930,” carried out at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin October 5 to 7, 2006. It was organized within the context of the project “Experimentalization of Life: Configurations between Science, Art, and Technology” situated in Department III of the Institute. While the larger project has discussed topics such as “Experimental Cultures,” the “Materiality of Time Relations in Life Sciences, Art, and Technology (1830-1930),” “Science and the City,” “Relations between the Living and the Lifeless,” and the “Shape of Experiment” in workshops and conferences, this workshop asked about the role sound plays in the configurations among science, technology and the arts, focusing on the years between 1800 and 1930. The chronological point of departure was the appearance of a registration technique: in 1802 Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni published his book on acoustics where he extensively described the Klangfiguren – his visualizations of the movements of a vibrating, sounding body. This time span was also characterized by the systematization of research into hearing, which Hermann von Helmholtz greatly promoted through his book On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, which first appeared in 1863. Helmholtz’s resonance theory of hearing described in this book was not replaced by a new explanation for the process of hearing until the end of the 1920s, which gives another temporal delineation for the workshop. Furthermore, between 1800 and 1930 a wealth of technical innovation in the realm of acoustical media occurred: in addition to a series of visualization techniques for sound, the phonograph and gramophone, microphone and loudspeaker, telephone and radio were invented. As well, the music of European tonal composition underwent a radical change during this time that led to a collapse of the tonal system and provoked the demand for music composed of sounds and noises, rather than tones. Conference participants were invited to discuss the role of sounds in the laboratory from different angles, in three parts. The “Materiality of Sound” was oriented towards research into material cultures and cultural techniques in experimentation. “Registration, Transmission, Transformation” put questions of medial historiography into the foreground, while “Experimental Aesthetics” thematized aesthetic implications. But these three points of departure were not understood as exclusive; and no strict separation between an aesthetic and an epistemological approach or a historical approach focusing on media or on sciences was intended. On the contrary, the intersection of such questions was brought forward and the circular arguments into which the configurations among sciences, technology and the arts are constantly forced were traced in the discussion. In the first part, “Materiality of Sound,” it was discussed how sound as it is being heard became an object of scientific research. Developments in nineteenth-century physiology contributed to an increasingly material conception of sound and thereby greatly furthered laboratory research on sound. With this, an interdisciplinary form of research came into being that involved physics and instrument making, musicology, phonetics or ethnology. The functioning of the ear was recreated in laboratories: sounds were synthesized and new sound sources invented; music and its instruments were investigated to lay bare the implicit knowledge that was assumed to be hidden in compositions, theories of harmony or in musical instruments. This research was accompanied 3 Julia Kursell by a constant adjustment of the material culture of experiment into what could be heard as the materiality of sound. This includes the experiments and the standardization of instruments and measuring devices; it concerns the exchanges between scientists and musicians, laboratories and workshops for musical and scientific instruments; it also comprises the invention of new sounds in music and the advent of electricity in the lab. All these developments caused sound to be heard in new ways. The second part, “Registration, Transmission, Transformation,” aimed to connect this history of sound in the laboratory with the appearance of new media technologies. Sound is fleeting; it only subsists as a mediated object, and historical research on sound always relies on some mediation. This medial condition of sound generates specific problems and questions that were addressed in this part of the workshop. The “méthode graphique” or the “phonautograph” allowed repeated access to recordings of fleeting sound events. Ensembles of sirens, resonators, the harmonium and tuning forks enabled the arbitrary production of well-defined sound. With the use of the phonograph and gramophone, sound became independent of its original context. Thus, ephemeral sound was molded into a scientific object by the interplay of experimental science and media technologies. The media technologies of recording, transmission and transformation also made a new phenomenality of sound audible. Within sound there were tones and clangs, signals and noise, information and distortion. In many cases, the discussion therefore set the bridge to the aesthetic issues that were focused on in the third part of the workshop. Under the heading of “Experimental Aesthetics,” the third part of this workshop considered the interrelation between science and music, researchers and composers, laboratories and concert halls. By transforming hearing into a scientific object, it could become a “problem” as Gaston Bachelard would term it. This affected the status of music. Nineteenth-century physiology appropriated the history of music as a kind of prehistory of the physiological theory of hearing. Experimenters believed that the Western tonal system reflected the ear’s ability to analyze sound, that music theory and composition were both grounded in calculable processes of hearing, and that the history of music mirrored the physical laws of hearing. Some fundamental notions of musical aesthetics – consonance and dissonance, scales, triads and modes – apparently could be confirmed experimentally, and yet the postulated systematic connection between physiology and musical aesthetics did not hold. The experiments did not reveal a natural order in the system of music, but found instead an arbitrary ordering. Nineteenth-century research on hearing could not provide a physiological foundation for musical aesthetics. Musical aesthetics did, however, heavily inform research on hearing. This can be seen in the choice of sound sources that were brought into action in the laboratory and can be followed in the experimental set-ups that produced beats and combination tones, and finally in the wordings and choices of hypotheses that were tested experimentally. The poster for this workshop shows the shadow of a human figure in front of a blackboard. In the middle of this blackboard we see the schematic drawing of a tape recorder. The person who made the drawing was the radio journalist, researcher and composer Pierre Schaeffer. The variety of domains he worked in seems to be symptomatic of the fact that it is not so simple to designate a starting point from which to talk about sound and hearing. This was mirrored in the fact that historians of science, media and culture, philologists, musicologists and philosophers gathered to discuss the history of sound in the laboratory. These introductory remarks offer me the 4 Introductory Remarks opportunity to thank them for their willingness to participate in the interdisciplinary endeavor. Also, I would like to thank those who helped to make this workshop possible: my colleagues from the project on the “Experimentalization of Life”, especially Sven Dierig and Henning Schmidgen, for their support in developing the concept of this workshop, Britta Lange, Katrin Solhdju and Wolfgang Lefèvre for chairing sessions, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger for participating as a commentator; Antje Radeck, Leona Geisler, Mirjam Lewin, Philipp Messner, and Frederik Schulze for organizational support, and Angelika Irmscher for providing the layout of this preprint. Also, I would like to thank the Museum of Musical Instruments SIMPK and