Hermann von Helmholtz and the Sensations of Tone

Abstract

In the 1840s it seemed improbable, even offensive to some, that musical sounds could be analysed in the same way that a chemical compound could be reduced to elements, or the way light could be separated into a spectrum. Today we take for granted the notion that musical sounds are in fact a compound of simple, pure frequencies. Electronic equipment does this analysis automatically. We play a trumpet into a microphone and a spectrogram appears on a monitor. The basis for this, Fourier analysis (a mathematical description of periodic behaviour), first appeared in the mid nineteenth century. What historical circumstances made this mathematical theory so “pre-eminently fertile”? How did musical sounds, “the most immaterial, evanescent, and tender creator of incalculable and indescribable states of consciousness,”² enter into the laboratory to be analyzed, manipulated and measured? How was this German background different from Koenig’s unique training with sound?

Music has hitherto withdrawn itself from scientific treatment more than any other art….It always struck me as a wonderful and peculiarly interesting mystery, that in the theory of musical sounds, in the physical and technical foundations of music, which above all other arts seems in its action on the mind the most immaterial, evanescent, and tender creator of incalculable and indescribable states of consciousness, that here in especial the science of purest and strictest thought—mathematics—should prove pre-eminently fertile.¹

Hermann von Helmholtz, Bonn, 1857.