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The romantic idea that music and the universe were somehow interlinked is an ancient one, going back to the Pythagorean conception of the ‘music of the spheres’. Though not new to the nineteenth century, such imaginative comparisons took on increasing significance during the 1830s and 1840s, especially in Britain, where visions of a harmonious universe, governed by a few divinely-ordained laws, provided an important counterweight to political radicalism and theological materialism. The links between the study of light and sound have been well explored, notably Thomas Young’s experimental inquiries, but by the mid-nineteenth century, the investigation of sound was inseparable from the broader examination of natural phenomena; especially the invisible forces of heat, light, electricity, and magnetism. My paper focuses on the writings of William Whewell, Mary Somerville, and John Herschel to explore how sound, and specifically music, provided crucial evidence to support their interpretations of nature. Each of these three authors, probably the leading British science writers of their day, was eager to project their image of a harmonious, connected universe, brought about by a benevolent Creator.  While Herschel and Whewell both conceived of sound as evidence of the unity of nature, Somerville conceived of the universe as a finely-tuned organ. Within the context of political uncertainty, religious controversy, and social instability, ideals of a harmonious universe became urgent.

 

Noise has been a common sonic experience since the beginning of history.  For a long time, noise was construed as sound of any form, aggregate of sounds, voice, cry, or roar that was voluminous, disturbing, composite, or extraordinary.  By the nineteenth century, however, two specific understandings emerged from this generic characterization: noise as irregular and inharmonious sounds that went against the human senses, and noise as annoying sounds of the surrounding that invaded into the public and private spaces and disrupted tranquility.  While the idea of noise as discordance and the idea of noise as nuisance intertwined with each other, they came from different historical contexts.  The concept of discordance tied to the Western theories of music since Antiquity, especially their preoccupation with harmonious tones and attempts to make sense of such tones with cosmic-numerological or (later on) psycho-physiological reasons.  The concept of nuisance had a close relationship with the efforts by governments, local communities, and civic groups to control and “abate” din in urban and industrial settings.  Owing to the rise of acoustical and psycho-physiological research on sounds and the increasing severity of clamor as a consequence of urbanization and the Industrial Revolution, these two notions became the dominant subjects of discussions on noise in technical literature and public discourses before the introduction of the sound-reproducing technologies.  These two understandings of noise also became the invisible yet important backgrounds when scientists and engineers in the twentieth century dealt with acoustic and informational noise.

Recent research has highlighted a flourishing of exchange between the musical and scientific fields of nineteenth-century Germany, with discussions of Hermann von Helmholtz’s writings on music and the psychophysics of listening featuring especially prominently (Jackson 2006; Steege 2012; Hui 2013). This paper outlines a related but little-discussed aspect of this interdisciplinary history. In the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, a group of German professors of music, situated primarily in the newly dominant music conservatories, drew from developing knowledges in physiology and psychology to reformulate and expand prevailing conceptions of musical capacity. 
Drawing from archival research at Berlin’s Universität der Künste as well as contemporaneous music education journals and other published materials, I discuss how even the most apparently simple of musical actions (playing a single note on the violin, perhaps) came to be seen as demonstrating a remarkable multiplicity of physiological and psychological processes. In response, new emphasis began to be placed on “musicalizing” young students through elementary studies in perceiving and producing musical movement, rhythm, tone, dynamics, and phrasing. Furthermore, both conservatory curricula and journalistic discourse placed new value on musical practices that required transducing between distinct media (such as music dictation, which transduces the reception of auditory information into the production of its written representation). By way of conclusion, I analyze how these attempts to define musicality anew—its norms, potentialities, and pathologies—were entangled with the pedagogical practices of training and examination through which that very musicality was developed and assessed.