Ear and Instrument.

Hermann v. Helmholtz's "On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music".

The project investigates the relation of psycho-physiological research and musicological theory. It will consider music as an experimental setup in its own right, tracing the changes in the aesthetics of music brought forth by physiological research. The point of departure is Hermann von Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, first published in 1863. In this work, Helmholtz develops a theory of hearing, according to which the ear functions like a measuring instrument, analyzing complex waveforms and resolving them into their sinusoidal components. Instrument makers, just like musicians and composers, are guided in their work by this activity of the ear, and therefore a tacit, empirical knowledge is enclosed in their products: ear and instrument are connected by more than just a metaphor: Helmholtz perceives the piano to be a reconstruction of the ear, and likewise, the ear's functioning is modelled on the piano. Furthermore, Helmholtz reproduces the rules of music theory and the history of music by means of experimentation, just as the teaching of orchestration involves extensive self-description of music as an experiment. Step by step, the European tradition of music has, as it were, explored its own physiological conditions, and so the distinctions between major and minor, or consonance and dissonance, corroborate the physiological theory of hearing. Based on the physiology of hearing and the knowledge of musical instruments, a new theory of music shall once again demonstrate the unity of art and nature. But this circularity of technology, physiology and aesthetics, of musical instruments, experimental setups and the theory of music, calls forth effects that reach far beyond this circle. The experimental setups used by Helmholtz for this purpose produce new sounds, sounds not provided for by 19th century music, and the very aesthetics of music that was to prove the physiological theory of hearing eventually collapsed under its scientific explanation. If Helmholtz left it to aesthetics to draw the line between sound and music, the music of the 20th century, in the wake of Helmholtz, is known to have abandoned this distinction: The Sensations of Tone points toward aesthetic experiments the outcome of which is open.