Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“This book reveals the Victorians as you’ve never heard them before. Music, often associated in the nineteenth century with the emotional, spiritual, and aesthetic aspects of life, was also simultaneously the subject of science. Edward Gillin engagingly traces the traffic between concert halls, shops, laboratories, and lecture theaters that made it possible to think about sound scientifically. In doing so, he adds a new sense to our understanding of science in the making of the modern world.” -- Jim Secord, author of 'Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age'
“
Sound Authorities identifies a blank spot on the map of sound studies. Using the key term of ‘authority,’ Gillin places Britain in the history of nineteenth-century sound and music. Sound’s ephemerality, Gillin compellingly argues, prompted people to stake their claim in the discourse on sound. The complex question of who was entitled to speak of music as vibration and of sound as elevating the soul weaves into an elegantly written narrative. A must-read for those active in the fields of nineteenth-century sound and music studies.” -- Julia Kursell, University of Amsterdam
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Sound Authorities is a carefully crafted, well-researched, and original work. Gillin convincingly argues that a close examination of sound as it moves through various spaces of nineteenth-century Britain offers new insight into scientific practice and scientific authority. This book is an important contribution to both sound studies and the history of science.” -- Alexandra Hui, Mississippi State University
"Gillin opens his study of sound in 19th-century Britain by observing that this was a time when 'to see was not, in itself, to know' (p. 18)—natural philosophy relied on the ear as well as the eye for empirical knowledge—and that musical and religious convictions could also be important in the scientific understanding of nature. . . The epilogue offers startling insights into sound in the early modern age. Recommended." * Choice *
Table of ContentsList of Figures and Tables
Introduction: Sounds and Sweet Airs: Science, Sound, and Music in Britain, 1815–1914
Part I Experiments and Mathematics: The Making of Sound as a Scientific Object
Chapter 1 The Laboratory of Harmony: The Transformation of Sound within British Science, 1815–46
Chapter 2 A Harmonious Universe: Herschel, Whewell, Somerville, and the Place of Sound in British Mathematics, 1830–70
Part II Contesting Knowledge: Mathematicians, Musicians, and Sound Measurements
Chapter 3 The Problem of Pitch: Mathematical Authority and the Mid-Victorian Search for a Musical Standard
Chapter 4 Accuracy and Audibility: Mathematics, Musical Consensus, and the Unreliability of Sound, 1835–81
Part III Materialism and Morality: Religious Authority and the Science of Sound
Chapter 5 Musical Matter: Religious Authority, John Tyndall, and the Challenge of Materialism, 1859–1914
Epilogue: Musical Spiders and Sounds Scientific in the Modern Age
Acknowledgments
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
