Klangmaschinen zwischen Experiment und Medientechnik (review)

Working in the context of phlogiston theory, Irish chemist Bryan Higgins conducted an experiment in the year 1777 in which he lit hydrogen gas in a glass tube. He noticed that if “the tube is not too large, the flame becomes smaller as it is depressed, and when it is much reduced, the tube emits clear sounds” (p. 36). Higgins found that he could vary the sounds by changing the dimensions and material characteristics of the tubes. The “singing flames” that resulted from Higgins’s experiments were soon explored for their musical possibilities. At the end of the eighteenth century, natural scientists published on the “chemical harmonica” and compared its sound to the then popular glass harmonica. In 1873, at the Vienna World’s Fair, physicist, chemist, and musician Georges Kastner presented his pyrophone, a chemical harmonica that could be played as an ordinary piano. It was displayed, however, not as a new musical instrument, but in a section dedicated to scientific apparatus.

Since the eighteenth century, new forms of sound production have been discovered as a side effect of laboratory experiments, often leading to the development of new musical instruments. This collection of fifteen shorter and longer papers in German examines how new “sound machines” have emerged from the zones of exchange between experimental physics, music, and media. It offers insights in the various entanglements of technical and artistic knowledge and research practices. An example of this border crossing between science and the arts is the use of the metronome and the tuning fork in twentieth-century music. Developed as nineteenth-century measuring devices aimed at standardizing musical tempo and pitch, they were used as musical instruments by twentieth-century composers such as György Ligeti (Poème symphonique) and Warren Burt (Music for Tuning Forks). New ideas on music can be traced back to the development of musical technologies, as in the case of Italian composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni. His Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (1907), an attempt to innovate the musical language of his time, extrapolates the possibilities of Thaddeus Cahill’s telharmonium, the first electro-acoustic musical instrument, into the domain of music composition.

Sound machines not only changed the production and artistic use of sounds, but also their transmission and the acoustic conditions under which they can be heard. The vocoder or “VOice-CODER” was developed in the 1920s to transmit telephone conversations across the Atlantic via telegraph cable, but it also started a technical development that broke down spoken language in parameters, thereby anticipating the digitization of sound. Similarly, Wallace Clement Sabine’s mathematical formula for reverberation, which generalized the findings of his acoustic experiments, can be seen as a sound machine in itself. The acoustic characteristics of any auditorium could from now on be changed by manipulating the material characteristics of the space, and later by electronically creating virtual auditory spaces.

In his introduction to the volume, editor Daniel Gethmann argues that artists can be experimenters, just as scientists and engineers can be artists. The example of Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer shows how an artistic performance not only incorporates the habitus of scientific experiments, but also becomes an experimental situation in itself. During the first performance of the piece in 1965, alpha waves in Lucier’s brain were recorded, amplified, and made audible through loudspeakers. Sound machines such as the Max Brand synthesizer, developed by German composer and electro-technician Robert Moog in the 1960s, came about through practices of tinkering and experimentation in which the disciplinary boundaries among science, technology, and the arts became permeable.

This collection of essays offers a fascinating exploration of the transitory spaces among science, music, and media history. It is a rich and valuable contribution not only to the fields of music history, science history, and sound studies, but also to the emerging field of artistic research.