Music, Sound, and the Laboratory from 1750 to 1980 by Alexandra Hui,* Julia Kursell,† and Myles W. Jackson‡ Music and science have a long common history dating back to the ancient Greeks. This shared history became uncoupled some time in the late nineteenth century, as music ceased to be the most important source of sound that could be subjected to investigation. Knowledge of sound always relies on some form of medium—that is, a way to store, transmit, transform, manipulate, and encode or decode sound. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, the techniques and practices of producing, describing, and reproducing sounds had been the most developed in music, and sci- entists, engineers, and musicians were engaged in similar, reciprocal projects. Music remained privileged as an object of acoustic investigation, driven in part by the bour- geois culture of music that fl ourished during the nineteenth century, especially in central Europe, and created a public of listeners and producers of musical sounds. Yet, at the same time, scientists and engineers broadened the scope of investigation beyond music, to sound, with new mathematical tools, new fi elds of experimental inquiry, and eventually new media technologies, most often located in laboratories. Music continued to frame the interaction among scientists, engineers, and musicians, and, though perhaps less immediately apparent, this reciprocal engagement has con- tinued, over time becoming more intricate, intriguing, and historically informative. Our volume illuminates the ongoing reciprocal relationship between scientifi c in- vestigation, on one hand, and music and sound, on the other. We offer a series of his- torically and locally specifi ed case studies, mostly between 1750 and 1980, devoted to the entanglement of music, sound, and the laboratory. The authors approach the topic from a variety of perspectives: history of science and technology, music history, science studies, and media studies. Starting in the 1980s, Anglo- American histo- ries of science drew upon new trends being generated in the social sciences with a view to avoiding earlier distinctions between the context and content of the scien- tifi c enterprise. Any discipline or fi eld that wants to tackle the role of sound must refl ect on the media through which sound propagates. Historians, in particular, have explored in recent years the multiple ways in which we can glean information about sensory experiences in the past.1 Although the project to fi nd out how people lived * Department of History, Mississippi State University, Box H, Mississippi State, MS 39762; ahui@ history.msstate .edu. † Capaciteitsgroep muziekwetenschap, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, 1012 CP Amsterdam, Netherlands; [email protected]. ‡ NYU- Gallatin, 1 Washington Place, Room 405, New York, NY 10003; myles.jackson@nyu .edu. 1 See, e.g., Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley, Calif., 2008). © 2013 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0369-7827/11/2013-0001$10.00 OSIRIS 2013, 28 : 1–11 1 This content downloaded from 147.213.131.2 on Tue, 11 Nov 2014 08:06:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 2 ALEXANDRA HUI, JULIA KURSELL, AND MYLES W. JACKSON in different historical contexts is as exciting as it is methodologically diffi cult, the history of sound is not alone in its quest for uncovering sounds of earlier periods. Another discipline engaged in this quest, which until fairly recently was conspicuous in its absence from the history of science and science studies, is media studies.2 As Bernhard Siegert’s contribution to this volume suggests, media studies scholars are interested in studying the question of how scientifi c instruments can turn into media. A history of science that seeks insights into the concepts of sound that prevailed his- torically must include media history. We hope this volume provides an introduction to media scholars’ use of concepts and methods relevant to the history of science, which can enhance our understanding of the scientifi c enterprise and its growth. In the study of vision the interplay between questions of mediation and scientifi c inquiry has proven less problematic than in the case of sound. In the process of de- veloping this volume, we have taken some cues from the work of science- studies scholars on the role of vision and visualization in the practice of science. Diagrams, sketches, equations, formulas, tables, graphs, photographs, and related vision- based analytical practices have been the focus of the work by science and technology stud- ies (STS) scholars and historians of science and technology for the past quarter cen- tury. Many informative studies have shown how scientifi c instruments, in the form of inscription devices, render the invisible visible.3 Michael Lynch has spoken of the age of the “externalized retina” to denote the importance of the visual culture to the study of science.4 While our libraries are fi lled with the important studies relevant to the visual elucidation of science, the importance of listening and hearing to the scien- tifi c enterprise has, until recently, been ignored.5 This volume attempts to redress the imbalance. We do not wish to ignore the vi- sual, as sound is often defi ned in comparison to it. Rather, we claim that studies fo- cusing on sound and listening stress other critical aspects of experimental science. Music provided knowledge, techniques, instruments, and data necessary for research in physiology, thermodynamics, psychology, phonetics, communication technology, and many other disciplines that seem remote from the art of sound. At the same time laboratory noises and sounds yielded important information. To give one example: pitches generated by labial and reed pipes in nineteenth- century laboratories con- 2 A notable exception was the Writing Science series edited by Timothy Lenoir and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht at Stanford University Press. The journal Grey Room published a valuable introduction into “new German media studies” (vol. 29 [2007], ed. Eva Horn), with contributions by scholars who, after Friedrich Kittler, have given a new foundation to the fi eld of media studies in Germany (see his Discourse Networks, 1800/ 1900, with a foreword by David E. Wellbery [Stanford, Calif., 1990] and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [Stanford, Calif., 1999]) and have also taken into account the history of science. The journal recently took up this thread, also giving room to historians of science, in the volume Audio/ Visual (43 [2011], ed. Mara Mills and John Tresch). 3 The classic works are Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life (London, 1979), and Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Our Eyes and Hands,” Knowledge in Society 6 (1986): 1– 40. 4 Lynch, “Externalized Retina: Selection and Mathematization in the Visual Documentation of Ob- jects in the Life Sciences,” Human Studies 11 (1988): 201– 34. 5 This point has been made by a variety of scholars. See, e.g., Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, “Should One Applaud? Breaches and Boundaries in the Reception of New Technology in Music,” Technology and Culture 22 (2003): 536– 59; Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900– 1933 (Cam- bridge, Mass., 2002); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Production (Ra- leigh, N.C., 2003). This content downloaded from 147.213.131.2 on Tue, 11 Nov 2014 08:06:27 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions MUSIC, SOUND, AND THE LABORATORY FROM 1750 TO 1980 3 veyed the necessary data for the calculation of the speed of sound through air and other gases.6 Though originating in organ building, pipes thus took part in the experi- mental confi rmation of Laplace’s constant for the ratio of a sound wave’s density to its pressure and the study of adiabatic phenomena.7 Another example: in the biologi- cal laboratories of the 1980s, listening skills were used to track radioactive probes.8 As these examples show, scientifi c instruments not only generated transcriptions, they created aural information as well. Both the skill of hearing and the knowledge necessary for sound production were involved. Our volume tackles this reciprocity. We believe, perhaps unsurprisingly, that this reciprocity is historically bound. The relation between music and science changed profoundly during the two centuries this volume seeks to investigate. We argue that this change cannot be ascribed to the his- tory of music or the history of science alone, but points to the entwined histories of Western science and music that musicologist Emily Dolan and historian of science John Tresch envisage in their shared contribution to this volume. The interplay of research, technology, and music created new ways of listening. These new ways of listening in turn conferred status upon the sense of hearing in science. At the same time as audible data began to provide evidence, music led to detecting and listening to sounds created in the laboratory. This stimulated a circulation of material objects between science and music that forms an important theme of our volume. A brief gloss on this narrative follows. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, both music and science had under- gone radical transformations, which in turn colored their interactions. Music was no longer the main source of objects for acoustical experimentation. Natural scien- tists had turned to techniques of visualization and recording; the beautiful vibrat- ing plates of Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni are perhaps the best- known example. Sensory physiology, as well as the psychology of music and listening, emerged as empirical sciences that fi rmly integrated experimentation into their methodology. Seeking controlled phenomena for their investigations, these fi elds relied more and more on electronics for both the production and analysis of the investigated phenom- ena.