What does it mean to hear scientifically? What does it mean to see musically? This edited volume uncovers a hidden history, one in which the activities of musical entertainment and scientific discovery were not mutually exclusive. The collection gathers work by leading scholars to reveal as-yet-undocumented associations between music and science. These two disciplines were conjoined in ways hitherto unrecognized, through vibrant popular practices that celebrated entanglements of seeing and hearing. Sound was implicated in the development of new forms of knowledge, furnishing understandings of ... More

What does it mean to hear scientifically? What does it mean to see musically? This edited volume uncovers a hidden history, one in which the activities of musical entertainment and scientific discovery were not mutually exclusive. The collection gathers work by leading scholars to reveal as-yet-undocumented associations between music and science. These two disciplines were conjoined in ways hitherto unrecognized, through vibrant popular practices that celebrated entanglements of seeing and hearing. Sound was implicated in the development of new forms of knowledge, furnishing understandings of light and its perception, even while vision informed scientific conceptions of music. The power of science, as much as the power of music, relied on performance, spectacle, experiment, and the virtuosic art of the "romantic" performer-genius. London is reimagined here: no longer the capital of das Land ohne Musik, it is rather the most important European center for the consolidation of the study of sound. The focus is a crucial sixty-year period, from Charles Burney’s ambitious General History of Music, a four-volume study of music around the globe “from the earliest ages to the present period” (completed in 1789) to the Great Exhibition of 1851, where musical instruments were assembled alongside the technologies of science and industry in the immense glass-encased collections of the Crystal Palace. The accumulated contents of these framing repositories set the stage for a new picture of modern disciplinarity, throwing light on an era before the "natural" division of aural and visual knowledge.