Reason and Resonance

A History of Modern Aurality

Veit Erlmann (Professor, Butler School of Music)

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English

Zone Books
23 October 2014

Philosophy

Series: Reason and Resonance

How the ear came to play a central role in modern culture and rationality. Hearing has traditionally been regarded as the second sense-as somehow less rational and less modern than the first sense, sight. Reason and Resonance explodes this myth by reconstructing the process through which the ear came to play a central role in modern culture and rationality. For the past four hundred years, hearing has been understood as involving the sympathetic resonance between the vibrating air and various parts of the inner ear. But the emergence of resonance as the centerpiece of modern aurality also coincides with the triumph of a new type of epistemology in which the absence of resonance is the very condition of thought. Our mind's relationship to the world is said to rest on distance or, as the very synonym for reason suggests, reflection. Reason and Resonance traces the genealogy of this ""intimate animosity"" between reason and resonance through a series of interrelated case studies involving a varied cast of otologists, philosophers, physiologists, pamphleteers, and music theorists. Among them are the seventeenth-century architect-zoologist Claude Perrault, who refuted Cartesianism in a book on sound and hearing; the Sturm und Drang poet Wilhelm Heinse and his friend the anatomist Samuel Soemmerring, who believed the ventricular fluid to be the interface between the soul and the auditory nerve; the renowned physiologist Johannes Muller, who invented the concept of ""sense energies""; and Muller's most important student, Hermann von Helmholtz, author of the magisterial Sensations of Tone. Erlman also discusses key twentieth-century thinkers of aurality, including Ernst Mach; the communications engineer and proponent of the first nonresonant wave theory of hearing, Georg von Bekesy; political activist and philosopher Gunther Anders; and Martin Heidegger.

By: Veit Erlmann (Professor Butler School of Music)
Imprint: Zone Books
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 38mm
Weight: 726g
ISBN: 9781935408055
ISBN 10: 1935408054
Series: Reason and Resonance
Pages: 424
Publication Date: 23 October 2014
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Veit Erlmann holds the Endowed Chair of Music History at the University of Texas at Austin's Butler School of Music.