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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]