Sound Authorities: Scientific and Musical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Britain [Hardcover]

Sound Authorities shows how experiences of music and sound played a crucial role in nineteenth-century scientific inquiry in Britain.

InSound Authorities, Edward J. Gillin focuses on hearing and aurality in Victorian Britain, claiming that the development of the natural sciences in this era cannot be understood without attending to the study of sound and music.

During this time, scientific practitioners attempted to fashion themselves as authorities on sonorous phenomena, coming into conflict with traditional musical elites as well as religious bodies. Gillin pays attention to sound in both musical and nonmusical contexts, specifically the cacophony of British industrialization.Sound Authoritiesbegins with the place of acoustics in early nineteenth-century London, examining scientific exhibitions, lectures, spectacles, workshops, laboratories, and showrooms. He goes on to explore how mathematicians mobilized sound in their understanding of natural laws and their vision of a harmonious ordered universe. In closing, Gillin delves into the era’s religious and metaphysical debates over the place of music (and humanity) in nature, the relationship between music and the divine, and the tensions between spiritualist understandings of sound and scientific ones.

Edward J. Gillinis a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Leeds. He is the author ofThe Palace of Science: Scientific Knowledge and the Building of the Victorian Houses of ParliamentandEntente Imperial: British and French Power in the Age of Empire. He is coeditor, with H. Horatio Joyce, ofExperiencing Architecture in the Nineteenth Century: Buildings and Society in the Modern Age.List 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 LaboralSž