Osiris, Volume 28

Music, Sound, and the Laboratory from 1750-1980

Hui Alexandra, Kursell Julia, Jackson Myles W.

The understanding of sound underwent profound changes with the advent of laboratory science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. New techniques of sound visualization and detection, the use of electricity to generate sound, and the emergence of computers radically reshaped the science of acoustics and the practice of music. The essays in this volume of "Osiris" explore the manifold transformations of sound ranging from soundproof rooms to psychoacoustics of seismology to galvanic music to pedaling technique. They also discuss more general themes such as the nature of scientific evidence and the development of instruments and instrumentation. In examining the reciprocity between music and science, this volume reaches a new register in the evolution of scientific methodology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

About the Author

Alexandra Hui is assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University, where she is also head of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Program, and a core faculty member of the Center for the History of Agriculture, Science, and the Environment in the South.

Julia Kursell is a musicologist at Bauhaus University in Germany.

Myles W. Jackson is professor of the history of science at New York University, both in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He also chairs New York University's Science and Society Program.

Back to the list of books