The Psychophysical Ear ─ Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910

In the middle of the nineteenth century, German and Austrian concertgoers began tohear new rhythms and harmonies as non-Western musical ensembles began to make their way to Europeancities and classical music introduced new compositional trends. At the same time, leadingphysicists, physiologists, and psychologists were preoccupied with understanding the sensoryperception of sound from a psychophysical perspective, seeking a direct and measurable relationshipbetween physical stimulation and physical sensation. These scientists incorporated specific soundsinto their experiments--the musical sounds listened to by upper middle class, liberal Germans andAustrians. In The Psychophysical Ear, Alexandra Hui examines this formativehistorical moment, when the worlds of natural science and music coalesced around the psychophysicsof sound sensation, and new musical aesthetics were interwoven with new conceptions of sound andhearing. Hui, a historian and a classically trained musician, describes the network of scientists,musicians, music critics, musicologists, and composers involved in this redefinition of listening.She identifies a source of tension for the psychophysicists: the seeming irreconcilability betweenthe idealist, universalizing goals of their science and the increasingly undeniable historical andcultural contingency of musical aesthetics. The convergence of the respective projects of thepsychophysical study of sound sensation and the aesthetics of music was, however, fleeting. By thebeginning of the twentieth century, with the professionalization of such fields as experimentalpsychology and ethnomusicology and the proliferation of new and different kinds of music, theaesthetic dimension of psychophysics began to disappear.