Reason and Resonance ─ A History of Modern Aurality

Hearing has traditionally been regarded as the second sense -- as somehow lessrational and less modern than the first sense, sight. Reason and Resonanceexplodes this myth by reconstructing the process through which the ear came to play a central rolein modern culture and rationality.

For the past four hundred years, hearing hasbeen understood as involving the sympathetic resonance between the vibrating air and various partsof the inner ear. But the emergence of resonance as the centerpiece of modern aurality alsocoincides with the triumph of a new type of epistemology in which the absence of resonance is thevery condition of thought. Our mind's relationship to the world is said to rest on distance or, asthe very synonym for reason suggests, reflection.

Reason andResonance traces the genealogy of this "intimate animosity" between reason andresonance through a series of interrelated case studies involving a varied cast of otologists,philosophers, physiologists, pamphleteers, and music theorists. Among them are theseventeenth-century architect-zoologist Claude Perrault, who refuted Cartesianism in a book on soundand hearing; the Sturm und Drang poet Wilhelm Heinse and his friend the anatomist Samuel Sommerring,who believed the ventricular fluid to be the interface between the soul and the auditory nerve; therenowned physiologist Johannes Muller, who invented the concept of "sense energies"; andMuller's most important student, Hermann von Helmholtz, author of the magisterialSensations of Tone. Erlman also discusses key twentieth-century thinkers ofaurality, including Ernst Mach; the communications engineer and proponent of the first nonresonantwave theory of hearing, Georg von Bekesy; political activist and philosopher Gunther Anders; andMartin Heidegger.

Veit Erlmann holds the Endowed Chair of Music History at the University of Texas at Austin's Butler School of Music.