Music and Physics: A Cultural,Interdisciplinary History

This essay investigates the triangular exchange among physicists, musicians, and instrument makers in nineteenth‐century Germany by proffering a material, cultural, and interdisciplinary history. It does so by analyzing four concrete examples of such exchanges: the relationship between musical automata and virtuosi, the reed pipe as an object of music and scientific measurement, the history of standardizing performance pitch, and the attempts to measure musical virtuosity. The goal of the essay is to suggest ways in which interdisciplinary cultural histories, which take the scientific content seriously, can be an improvement upon purely disciplinary histories.     

Wissenschaft und Musik – Einführende Bemerkungen

Science and music. Introductory remarks. The article presents a brief introduction to “Science and Music”, theme of the 44^th symposium of the “Society for History of Sciences” held in Munich in Mai 2007. The text begins with a brief reference to the numerous biographical connections between the two fields, but focuses primarily on topics that reveal music and the sciences to be results of shared cultural practices. Examples include: (1) shared objects in the material sense, meaning the use of particular instruments in both music and the sciences; (2) shared semantics, metaphors, and concepts, for example the use of the concepts like clang or tone color in acoustics and the psychology of audition, or talk of ‘mood’ and ‘harmony’ in both music and in literature; (3) direct interactions between mathematics, physics and music, for example in the electronic music of the twentieth century.