Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (review)

During the last two decades historical investigations into auditory culture have become increasingly popular, so much so that after the many turns cultural studies have experienced since the 1980s, several scholars have found it timely to signal an auditory turn. This does not mean that the “great divide” between the visual and the aural and the privileging of the eye over the ear, often seen as a hallmark of modernity, is dead and gone. But it has for some time been clear that this view is no longer tenable.

Veit Erlmann is one of the most prominent scholars to have advanced the cause of auditory culture. As a musicologist, ethnographer, and anthropologist with an emphasis on ethnomusicology, he has published widely in this field. The collection of essays he edited in 2004 on Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity has been particularly well-received. In Reason and Resonance, Erlmann investigates the genealogy of the perceived opposition between reason and resonance—an auditory phenomenon that usually is seen as posing unique challenges to rationalist ideas about the role of mind in perception—doing so by means of a series of well-chosen case studies.

But he does more. He shows that the received view—that from the early seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries reason and resonance were diametrically opposed—is only part of the story. Erlmann’s thesis is that during this period ideas about reason and resonance developed in contiguity. Even more, the acoustic and physiological phenomenon of resonance not only played a vital role in the history of modern aurality, but also—and this is the most exciting point—of rationality. Resonance is thus inextricably woven into modernity.

Erlmann starts his array of witnesses for his thesis with an—at first sight—highly unlikely candidate: René Descartes, a philosopher who, more than anyone else, is associated with the mind–body dichotomy. But as Erlmann shows, the completion of Descartes’s L’Homme in 1633—the book was published posthumously in 1662—also marks the beginning of a novel concept of the physiology of hearing, one that was entirely couched in terms of resonance. It marks the beginning of a reinterpretation of the relationship among mind, reason, and ear.

During the next three centuries two scientists in particular developed Descartes’s concept further: the French anatomist Joseph-Guichard Duvernay (in 1683) and particularly the German physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz (in 1863). And in 1928 Hungarian physiologist Georg von Békésy significantly changed the standard view on resonance theory and pitch perception. In a publication on the patterns of vibrations of the basilar membrane he argued that it was not selective resonance that was the key mechanism of pitch perception, but rather a traveling nonresonant wave. Such a wave affected a much wider area of the basilar membrane and the structures lining it than Helmholtz and others had thought. In the same year, 1928, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger completed his Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), which forcefully challenged the foundations of Cartesianism. As witnesses for his claim about a merging of scientific thinking and musical sensibilities during the modern period, Erlmann presents individuals less known than Helmholtz or Florens Friedrich Chladni, the “father of acoustics”: the late-eighteenth-century German poet Wilhelm Heise, the French médecin-philosophe Claude-Nicolas le Cat, a representative of Enlightenment otology who evolved into a critic of Cartesian-style resonance theory, and the German scientist Johann Wilhelm Ritter.

Erlmann’s book is not only a welcome addition to studies on the history of aurality, but also a thoroughly researched, cogently argued, and well-presented work that digs deeply into the source material spanning three centuries. This subtle study of admirable erudition is not so much an alternative history of auditory culture, but a successful attempt at a new synthesis that researchers in this field can ignore only at their loss. The book leaves little to be desired...