Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities around 1900 [1 ed.] 0226823288, 9780226823287

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
1 • Introduction: Disciplining Auditory Cognition
2 • The Sonic Unconscious: Neuropathology and Psychoanalysis
3 • Auditory Images: Linguistics and Metaphysics
4 • Sound as a Comparative Object: Physics Meets Psychology
5 • Aural Attention Muscle Feelings and the Quest for Authority in the Arts
6 • New Brains, Ears, and Tongues: Disciplines of Language Planning
7 • Conclusion: Time Leaps
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Thinking with Sound

Thinking with Sound A N e w Pr o g r a m i n t h e S c i e nc e s a n d H u m a n i t i e s a rou n d 19 0 0

Viktoria Tkaczyk

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2023 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2023 Printed in the United States of America 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82328-7 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82329-4 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226823294.001.0001 This book has been supported by the General Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tkaczyk, Viktoria, author. Title: Thinking with sound : a new program in the sciences and humanities around 1900 / Viktoria Tkaczyk. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022021788 | ISBN 9780226823287 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226823294 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Psychoacoustics—Europe—History—19th century. | Psychoacoustics—Europe—History—20th century. | Auditory perception—Research—Europe—History—19th century. | Auditory perception—Research—Europe—History—20th century. | Sound— Research—Europe—History—19th century. | Sound—Research— Europe—History—20th century. | Science—Social aspects— Europe. | Technology—Social aspects—Europe. | Science and the humanities—Europe. | BISAC: MUSIC / History & Criticism | HISTORY / Europe / General Classification: LCC QP461.T55 2023 | DDC 612.8/5—dc23/eng/20220610 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021788 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations * vii 1. Introduction: Disciplining Auditory Cognition * 1 2. The Sonic UNCONSCIOUS: Neuropathology and Psychoanalysis * 15 3. Auditory Image s: Linguistics and Metaphysics * 55 4. Sound a s a Compar ative Object: Physics Meets Psychology * 101 5. Aur al Attention: Muscle Feelings and the Quest for Authority in the Arts * 137 6. Ne w Br ains, E ar s, and Tongue s: Disciplines of Language Planning * 171 7. Conclusion: Time Leaps * 211 Acknowledgments * 217 Notes * 219 Bibliography * 255 Index * 291

Illustrations

Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2

Monsieur Leborgne’s brain, examined by Broca in 1861 The four brain areas responsible for speech, according to Wernicke (1874) Figure 2.3 Catalepsy induced by a very large tuning fork at the Salpêtrière (1879–80) Figure 2.4 Charcot’s bell model, reproduced in Ballet (1888) Figure 2.5 Catalepsy induced by light at the Salpêtrière (1879–80) Figure 2.6 Ballet caricatured in the Revue Chanteclair (1908) Figure 2.7 Freud’s psychological schema of word-presentation (1891) Figure 2.8 Freud’s topography of the psyche with a “hearing cap” (1923) Figure 2.9 Hearing cap with integrated earphones used by German pilots (1921) Figure 3.1 Opening of the Archives de la parole (1911) Figure 3.2 Saussure’s notes on Egger’s La parole intérieure (1881) Figure 3.3 Sketch from Saussure’s posthumously published Phonétique (written in Paris between 1881 and 1884) Figure 3.4 Diagram in Flournoy’s Des phénomènes de synopsie (1893) Figures 3.5a and 3.5b Circuits of communication in Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) Figure 3.6 Page of Saussure’s Paris notes from the 1880s Figure 3.7 Page of Bergson’s copy of Les maladies de la mémoire (1893) Figure 3.8 Diagram from Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896) showing the generation of a memory-image Figure 3.9 Telephone exchange in turn-of-the-century France (1904) Figure 3.10 Diagram from Matter and Memory (1896) explaining the derivation of mental images from a sensorimotor perception Figure 3.11 Waiting in line for Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France (1914)

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Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5 Figure 4.6 Figure 4.7

List of Illustr ations

Mach and Salcher’s 1887 experimental setup Early sound photographs by Mach and Salcher (1887) Pressure waves in Mach and Salcher’s 1887 experiment Letter from Salcher to Mach, March 11, 1887 Sound photograph of a gunshot, September 12, 1890 Mach’s experimental setup (1897) Mach’s sketch of Kussmaul’s model of neural associations in verbal processing (1896) Figure 4.8 Mach’s drawing of the Musikverein’s Great Hall (1885) Figures 4.9a and 4.9b Exner’s sketches of the auditorium of the University of Vienna physiology department (1905) Figures 4.10a and 4.10b Photograph and schematic plan of Exner’s acoustometer, designed in 1905 Figures 5.1a and 5.1b Laryngograph by Krueger and Wirth (1906) Figure 5.2 A selection of Sievers’s “optical signals” (1915–16) Figure 5.3 Test subject with Sievers’s optical signals (1915–16) Figure 5.4 The use of laryngoscopic mirrors by García (1878) Figure 5.5 The different registers of singing observed by Seiler (1879) Figure 5.6 Abraham’s scheme of neurophysiological associations (1901) Figure 5.7 Information sheet for a 1926 sound recording by Giese and Doegen Figure 5.8 Photographs capturing the facial expressions of women working under the influence of different recordings (1927) Figures 6.1a and 6.1b Gutzmann at the otolaryngology department of the Charité and during a therapeutic session Figure 6.2 “Interference apparatus” by Sauberschwarz (1895) Figures 6.3a and 6.3b Gutzmann’s sketch and formulas of human “ language pathways” (1898) Figure 6.4 Patent drawings for Gutzmann’s phonograph resonator (1923) Figure 6.5 Laryngograph constructed by Gutzmann (1908) Figure 6.6 Recording the voice of a British soldier in a prisoner-of-war camp (ca. 1915–1918) Figure 6.7 Organizational chart of the sound department (Lautabteilung) of the Prussian State Library (1929) Figure 6.8 A schoolboy studies a foreign language using the “DoegenOdeon-Lautapparat” (1930) Figure 6.9 Drawing of the Lauthalter patented by Doegen in May 1924

List of Illustr ations

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Figure 6.10 Information sheet for a sound recording on December 4, 1925, by Siebs Figures 6.11a and 6.11b Stumpf ’s experimental setting (1926) and Grützmacher’s electric method of sound analysis (1927) Figure 6.12 Braun carrying out microphone tests (ca. 1930) Figure 6.13 Still from Janker’s Röntgentonfilm der Sprache (1937)

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Introduction Di s c i p l i n i ng Au di t or y C o g n i t ion

In his 1886 study Le langage intérieur (Inner language), the French physiologist Gilbert Ballet recalls an evening walk home from theater: “Are we not often, when we leave the theater, quite obsessed with the auditory image left by pretty lines or a beautiful soliloquy delivered by a favorite actor? Now we hear those lines or that passage precisely as we did an instant before, when we were still in our seats. Certainly, the actor now declaims in a quiet voice—but this voice has the very same characteristics that just now delighted us.”1 Ballet’s hometown, Paris, was one of the leading theatrical cities in late nineteenth-century Europe.2 In the immediate vicinity of Ballet’s workplace, the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière on boulevard Saint-Germain, there were two light-entertainment theaters: the Théâtre des Gobelins and the Théâtre de Cluny.3 At the time, Ballet probably lived at 39 rue du Général Foy, close to both the Comédie-Française and the Théâtre de l’Odéon.4 When he composed these lines, Ballet may well have had in mind the sonorous voice, often associated with the rolling of thunder, of tragedian Mounet- Sully ( Jean- Sully Mounet), who left his mark on the period’s great roles at the Comédie-Française.5 Or perhaps he was thinking of Sarah Bernhardt’s famous voix d’or, which shaped a new elocutionary art both in Paris and on international tours.6 Paying homage to French theatrical art was not Ballet’s real objective, however. Listening again to a “favorite actor” in his mind’s ear was just one of many everyday instances that he thought could serve the study of the human faculty of speech. What Ballet intended his example to illustrate was a particular form of inner speech and hearing among the healthy: hearing one’s own voice and the voices of others whose words resonate in the memory. This passive form of internal speech (parole intérieure), claimed Ballet, is a precondition for two major human capacities—thinking and external speech. To further investigate the nature and structure of internal

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speech, he productively applied a varied set of methods, including selfobservation, hypnosis, and autopsies of patients who had suffered from speech disorders. Ballet was not the only one interested in examining what humans hear when listening to themselves. Especially in France and the Germanspeaking world, the decades between 1860 and 1930 saw the emergence of a remarkably dense web of scholars and scientists all concerned, in very different ways, with processes of auditory cognition. Thinking with Sound investigates this wide-ranging attention to the sounds that come to mind when the outside world is silent: inner voices, snippets of past conversations, imaginary debates, retrospective witticisms, catchy songs, or melodies provoked by sight-reading. The book moves nonchronologically through the numerous scientific and humanities disciplines interested in “thinking with sound.” These range from neuroanatomy, psychophysiology, and psychoanalysis to linguistics and metaphysics to shock-wave physics, materials science, and architectural acoustics to musicology, literary studies, and theater studies, and finally to phoniatry, language pedagogy, and radio studies. In this enterprise of a histoire totale, examining many disciplines or lines of research around 1900 at once, I show that modern thought is not exclusively ruled by a “hegemony of vision.”7 Yet it would be misleading to speak instead of a completely new and uniform discourse on sound arising in the period. Rather, the sciences and humanities addressed in this book are marked by a wealth of sound-related concepts, each of which highlight different epistemological demarcations within this broadly conceived historical setting. Why was the attention of so many disciplines at the turn of the twentieth century drawn for the first time—or for the first time in that explicit form—to sonic phenomena? There are manifold answers to that question, but four are especially defining for the argument of this book. First, the late nineteenth century saw the emergence of what we today call neuroscience. Of great importance in that process was the identification of the auditory cortex, which affected numerous disciplines across the sciences and humanities. Each discipline created concepts of auditory cognition that were core to its epistemology, and each regarded itself, to a greater or lesser extent, as a neuroscientific discipline. Second, these developments were paralleled by an increasing division of the academic world into what became known as the two cultures of the humanities and sciences. Many research agendas of the time registered the approach of a great divide, but tried to combat it. In that undertaking, they all proposed to think with sound in new and challenging ways.

Introduction

3

“Thinking with sound,” in its various incarnations, thus tied together an academic landscape that was fragmenting into increasingly specialized fields of research. It did so not only by mapping out common and diverging epistemic territories, but also (and this is my third point) by binding together theoretical and practical knowledge. The scholars and scientists who feature in this book were deeply involved in the musical culture of their time. They responded creatively to the great variety of musical instruments and technologies for sound recording and audio communication that were emerging around 1900, integrating them into their methods and practices of research. Their scholarly work, in turn, found application outside the academic realm. My fourth objective is, therefore, to examine how auditory knowledge, sonic skills, and learned auditory techniques were applied in aesthetic, political, and industrial domains. At the turn of the twentieth century, these four interdependent developments took shape beyond local arenas. Scholars traveled frequently and far; they collaborated in laboratories, attended conferences worldwide, and published in international journals. Tracking this transnational trend is one object of this book. The immensely complex history of each of the disciplines discussed here, however, calls for a more strictly defined chronological and geographical focus. I examine the political conditions, material infrastructures, and epistemologies underlying their formation in the cities of Paris, Geneva, Vienna, Prague, and Berlin around 1900.8 This approach makes it possible to trace in detail how daily contact, close cooperation, and continued communication between representatives of different scientific communities impelled them to think with sound both collectively and competitively. What emerges is a tightly woven network of scholars that includes both various famous figures—such as Jean-Martin Charcot, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, Henri Bergson, Hermann von Helmholtz, Ernst Mach, Sigmund Exner, and Carl Stumpf— and those far less well remembered today, whether scholars, laboratory assistants, technicians, artists, educational policy makers, industrial sponsors, or science communicators. The main actors of Thinking with Sound, however, are not limited to human agents, but include newly emerging disciplines. Taking inspiration from actor-network theory and more recent work in the history of science, I regard scientific disciplines as networks (or worknets, in Latour’s sense)—wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts, but fictitious and vulnerable wholes. Never at rest, disciplinary networks depend on their disciples, working methods, and findings. They promise long-term continuity while obscuring dissent among their representatives and the daily, often invisible labor that sustains them.9 Rehearsing their discipline’s

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history and core knowledge, these networks create features of identification, support hierarchies or alignments between strands of research, and shape future research agendas.10 Each chapter of this book brings together three such disciplines in order to study their interlocking and conflictual histories. As we will see, each cluster was “disciplining” auditory cognition in its own way by proposing discipline-specific concepts of thinking with sound, working with novel sound technologies, and developing distinct techniques of listening, speaking, and musicking.

Auditory Cognition Many of the actors present in this book are renowned as pioneers of their own particular discipline or field of research. Despite their different specializations, they had much in common. All shared an intellectual background in philosophy—then a wide-ranging discipline in a state of flux—and all showed a strong interest in the emerging field of neuroscience. Finally, all were inspired by the discovery of what is today called the auditory cortex, regarded as primarily responsible for processes of auditory cognition. Much noted in neuroscientific circles was a lecture that the Viennese neuroanatomist Theodor Meynert delivered to the Royal Imperial Society of Physicians in 1866. “Ein Fall von Sprachstörung, anatomisch begründet” (A case of speech disturbance, explained anatomically) recounts the case of a twenty-three-year-old patient who had been admitted to the Viennese clinic for internal medicine due to a heart condition. The young woman suddenly experienced problems with speech, mispronouncing words (substituting the meaningless Hutzen for her intended Husten, “cough”) or choosing completely inappropriate ones (“yellow” instead of “hand”). She died two weeks after admission and her body was passed to Meynert for autopsy. He discovered softened, reddish discolorations in the area of the left temporal gyrus, at the walls of the Sylvian fissure that separates the parietal from the temporal lobe and is connected to the auditory nerve by the fibers of what Meynert called the Acusticusstrang, or acoustic cord. This location, impossible to demarcate anatomically, was described vaguely by Meynert as a “sound field [Klangfeld] that is related to the ability to speak.”11 Damage to this field meant that the patient was no longer able to “pull” auditory images “over the threshold of consciousness” in order to connect the auditory, visual, and tactile images of an object.12 Meynert’s paper was published in the Society of Physicians’ yearbook, where it attracted both great interest and harsh criticism. The localiza-

Introduction

5

tion of speech in the brain was still a very young and contested field of research, with many physicians, theologians, and philosophers arguing that language processing was too complex, and the causes of language affections too diverse, to be reduced to the workings or lesion of specific areas of the brain. Despite this caveat, Meynert’s findings added considerable precision to the state of knowledge on the cognitive processing of auditory information in the cortex, laying the foundations for a research field known today as auditory neuroscience.13 This book’s aim is not to offer a history of auditory neuroscience in the narrow sense.14 Instead, I track the reception of neuroanatomical studies of the auditory cortex in neighboring disciplines, less proximate fields, and domains quite outside the university. Far from simply accepting Meynert’s research on the auditory cortex, these fields scrutinized it carefully and measured it against long-standing scientific questions about the relationship between the human body and mind. How exactly are the auditory cortex and sonic thinking connected to each other? Can cerebral processes cause or change the way we think, or vice versa? Do these realms work independently, or in parallel? In answering these questions, scholars and scientists created or adopted sound-related concepts that became central to their own epistemological agendas, whether “auditory image,” “auditory memory,” “auditory unconscious,” “inner speech,” “inner music,” “tonal gestalt,” or “laryngeal listening.” Some of these concepts have already been addressed in the rich literature on the history of hearing and listening cultures.15 What Thinking with Sound adds to that scholarship is a panoramic view of the numerous new insights into auditory cognition around 1900, the resulting concepts and techniques, and their constitution of important—in some cases, still accepted—theorems in the disciplines concerned.

Sonic Epistemologies, the Sciences, and the Humanities Over the course of the “material turn” in past decades, approaches associated with the history of theories have often been declared obsolete, overly cerebral, or Eurocentric. It is only recently that calls have arisen to draw new momentum from intellectual history, tracing the operation of theoretical discourses and concepts on various levels: the rational, the emotional, and the social.16 Historians of science and culture, for example, have studied processes of theory production and reception in the mass universities of postwar West Germany. In the “long summer of theory” of the 1960s, they observe, theories were consumed like drugs: “First the stuff circulated within small, independent groups; later it was peddled in large

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quantities, mainly at universities. It was administered extravenously— through pure conceptual labor, the rituals of reading.”17 But though the theoretical discourse of the postwar period was borne along by an unprecedented, politicized mass intellectualism, the “beguiling siren song” of theory was clearly not a product of the 1960s alone. The proliferation of sonic epistemologies in the decades around 1900 should, this book argues, be regarded as another turning point in modern theory formation. The wealth of theoretical work on auditory cognition discussed in the following chapters arose largely from the burgeoning of new scientific and humanities disciplines around 1900, which prompted special efforts to establish theoretically substantiated disciplinary profiles. These efforts may be seen as resulting from the transnational success of the Humboldtian model of the “research university,” which, at many nineteenth-century universities in Europe and worldwide, facilitated the rise of the “research seminar,” an institutionalized means to specialize in disciplines such as physiology, psychology, linguistics, musicology, or pedagogy.18 The ensuing foundation of discipline-bound institutes, laboratories, societies, and journals reinforced the trend toward disciplinary specialization. Scientists and scholars were required to distinguish themselves from their peers through individual research agendas and the publication of increasingly specialized monographs.19 Theoretical reasoning thus came to be firmly grounded in individual disciplines, bound to the emergence of innovative styles of thinking and writing.20 To counter this shift toward an ever more fragmented scientific landscape, academies such as the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin and the Académie des sciences in Paris endeavored to reassemble all disciplines under one roof.21 However, by classifying the disciplines into science- and humanities-based divisions or sections, the academies in fact participated in the opening of the divide between what would later famously be called “two cultures.”22 In line with recent work on the longer history of that duality, my own research confirms that “‘science’ and ‘humanities’ are heterogeneous, fuzzy categories, and highly mutable ones when followed through historical time.”23 Even so, in the wake of higher education reforms and the restructuring of scientific academies in the nineteenth century, the German Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (humanities, or literally sciences of the mind or spirit) and French sciences physiques et mathématiques and sciences morales began to be named as such, separated institutionally and topographically, and assigned their own curricula, objectives, and values.24 Many a scholar of the time discussed with some gusto the degree to which his or her research agenda belonged to the sciences or the humanities.

Introduction

7

The dividing line was not unambiguous, though, and distinctions often staked out schools, doctrines, theories, and methodologies within particular disciplines rather than deepening a rift between two cultures.25 Especially interesting for the present book are the “human sciences” (sciences humaines, Humanwissenschaften), a body of disciplines that emerged in the decades around 1900 and was situated somewhere between the newly delineated sciences and humanities. As Michel Foucault famously argued, the human sciences helped to build the modern concept of “man.” They were characterized by a structuralism avant la lettre, since their object of research was not human thought as such, but the structures and workings of the phenomena that seemed to facilitate it: the unconscious, language, and history.26 The period’s enormous interest in the structures of the sonic unconscious, of inner and outer speech, and of sonic thought more generally was no exception to that pattern. But it would be an exaggeration to claim that this interest prompted a radical “expulsion of the human spirit from the humanities.”27 Several of the disciplines that I address did investigate the human facility of auditory processing from a structuralist or protostructuralist point of view, but others took very different paths in their search for new ways to understand the sonic products of the human mind. The various theories of auditory cognition that coexisted around 1900 reflected both the rise of a new discourse on human thought and the emergence of a plethora of new disciplines literally dedicated to hearing themselves think. Accordingly, I seek sonic ideas not exclusively in what is today considered the classic literature of the sciences and humanities around 1900. The hunting grounds for this book include work protocols and notebooks, sketches and scribbled drafts, conference proceedings and letter correspondences along with instruments, scientific collections, and other research tools. As this wide range of published and archival material will show, in the period between 1860 and 1930, auditory concepts served on the one hand to draw epistemological distinctions, defining a certain raison d’être for a certain discipline. On the other hand, most of these concepts’ proponents still shared a common intellectual heritage and interacted in departments, university faculties, and scientific academies. In an increasingly diverse academic landscape, with ever more specialized fields of research, thinking with sound thus became a program that could both separate disciplines and bind them together. An exemplary case of this ambivalence is the “sonic unconscious” researched and defined in neuropathology and psychoanalysis around 1900. Chapter 2 traces the emergence of this concept. The chapter’s pivotal figure is the physiologist quoted above, Gilbert Ballet of the Salpêtrière in Paris,

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who completed his studies under neuroanatomist Jean-Martin Charcot. Ballet’s research on what he called “interior language” built on contemporary work on the auditory cortex, combining it with Charcot’s methods of hypnosis and diagnosis. To externalize their patients’ unconscious, Charcot and his colleagues used instruments of provocation—tuning forks, gongs, flashlight devices—manufactured in the Salpêtrière’s own workshops to suit the research problems at hand. Despite ridicule from his colleagues, Ballet also applied the far older method of introspection in his attempt to find out more about the phenomenon of inner speech. One aspect of Ballet’s work is especially intriguing for the purposes of this book; it bears the seeds of a structuralist theory of the sonic unconscious, deliberately oscillating between scientific and humanistic knowledge, that was adopted by Sigmund Freud after his visit to the Salpêtrière in 1885– 86. Freud and Ballet, far more than their medical peers, were interested in classical philosophy and especially the richly historical topos of inner speech. Through that focus, they paved the way for the history of medicine and psychoanalytical literary studies, blurring the boundary between the sciences and the humanities. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, discussed in chapter 3, posed the question “Science or humanities?” for linguistics. In the 1880s, Saussure was also working in Paris, where he devised a theory of signs that borrowed the notion of the image acoustique from Charcot, Ballet, and psychologist Victor Egger, but reinterpreted it along the lines of a collective auditory and linguistic memory—culminating in a social theory of language and ultimately forcing linguistics to apply a multidisciplinary, structuralist methodology. Contemporaneously with Saussure, philosopher Henri Bergson took a critical view of the positivist, materialist neuroanatomy and psychophysiology being pursued in 1880s Paris. His major opponent was Théodule Ribot, another disciple of Charcot and Ballet and later a colleague of Bergson’s at the Collège de France. In his writings, Bergson developed a metaphysical concept of “acoustic images” as both a rebuttal of Ribot’s physiological approach and an intervention into university policy and the disciplinary cartography of his day. Bergson aimed to return psychological topics to the sovereignty of philosophy and supply a metaphysical chassis for the human sciences, which were only just becoming established as a distinct subject area in France. The reception of his work was euphoric. Students and colleagues lined up for his lectures at the Collège de France to be part of what promised to be a new trend in the humanities. Ballet, Freud, Bergson, and Saussure were connected by more than the city of Paris during the early phases of their qualification. Their per-

Introduction

9

sonal encounters and professional dialogue left deep marks on their work. From different perspectives, all four considered theories and techniques of thinking with sound; all four worked from neurophysiological findings on the acoustic image, and each used the concept differently to define a distinct disciplinary epistemology.

Sound Technologies, Musical Instruments, and Sonic Skills It has been argued that what galvanized many scientific and humanities disciplines at the turn of the twentieth century were the new sound technologies of the day, especially the phonograph. Among the most distinguished proponents of this narrative was German media scholar Friedrich Kittler.28 When US engineer Thomas Alva Edison submitted his patent application for the “talking machine” in December 1877 and shortly thereafter began to market the device internationally, Kittler’s argument runs, scientists reacted with enthusiasm. At last, they seemed to have access to a research instrument that would enable a precise, repeatable, and mechanically objective analysis of language, music, noise, speech sounds, and acoustic environments. Sound recording defined a new way of dealing with time-based research objects and permitted great distances of time and place to be overcome. From this point on, the phonograph served on the one hand as a research tool that widened the horizon of many disciplines, and on the other hand as an object of comparison and a substitute for human memory. Today, historians of media, music, and science still draw on this view, though they are more hesitant to accept quite such an all-encompassing “phonographic regime.”29 Several scholars cite precursory cultural practices of conservation and compression that would “crystallize” into the nineteenth-century technology of sound recording.30 Others remind us of the inequity of access to early mass-produced sound and, in particular, note the imperialist impact of the phonograph on the formation of knowledge within directly and indirectly colonialist endeavors.31 Building on the enduring scholarly interest in sound recording devices, this book correlates phonography’s epistemic, cultural, and political potential with the deluge of technological innovations around 1900, not all of which have remained equally familiar: graphic inscription media (the phonautograph, Parlograph, sound photography), communication media (telephone, loudspeaker, microphone, radio), acoustic testing and stimulation instruments (Galton whistle, tuning fork, tonometer), and measuring devices (chronometer, neuramoebimeter, acoustometer). The use of these technologies in different fields of knowledge reflects a huge

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range of forms of “thinking with sound” in the sciences and humanities, each uniting technological and epistemic developments in its own way. That spectrum cannot be accounted for by a single, supposedly dominant media logic. Instead, this book brings to light the many purposes for which musical instruments and sound media served as research tools, while some of the scientific instruments designed in these and other areas underwent a process of “becoming media” and carrying bodies of knowledge beyond the walls of academia.32 Most of the technologies I discuss also served as boundary objects to facilitate cooperation among certain scholars or lines of research while excluding others. They contributed to the formation of “sonic skills” in the sense of occupationally specific methods of producing, receiving, storing, sharing, and comparing sound.33 Lending an ear to the particular uses of technologies by particular scholars around 1900 reveals not only a great diversity of practices and skills, but also the contributions of the technologies to epistemic change in the disciplines that produced them. From this perspective, chapter 4 sheds new light on Ernst Mach’s schlieren photography experiments of the 1880s. The experiments enabled Mach to capture shock waves visually and explain the phenomenon of the “double report” or sonic boom. They resulted in a physical theory whereby the speeds of sound can be defined only in relation to one another—in other words, a relational theory of motion, which Albert Einstein later described as groundbreaking for the general theory of relativity. Though Einstein’s reading of Mach is now contested, Mach’s studies on shock waves remain foundational in ballistics and fluid mechanics. They are crucial for the present study, as it was in his shock-wave experiments that Mach made his case for comparative listening as a method in physics. Only trained ears, he contended, are capable of comparing different sound phenomena in order to identify the double report, the Doppler effect, and, more generally, the propagation of sound in space. Having argued that his physical theories were enabled only by sensory observation, Mach explained the acquisition of physical knowledge from a psychophysiological perspective, thus reunifying two disciplines that were increasingly going their own ways at the time. This undertaking suggests a perhaps unexpected parallel with the physiologist Sigmund Exner, who was teaching in Vienna at the same time as Mach. Exner made new connections between physical acoustics and physiological research on auditory cognition, which may have motivated him to unceremoniously demolish the existing foundations of architectural acoustics. In a 1904 study on reverberation time, Exner argued that the propagation of sound in space cannot be thought through without reference to the listening

Introduction

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human subject. But that subject’s sensory perception, he believed, was unreliable. To circumvent the deficiencies of human hearing, he invented the “acoustometer,” an instrument to objectively measure reverberation in architectural acoustics. Both Mach and Exner carved out their interdisciplinary profiles with the help of new methods and technologies, some of which they designed themselves.

Applied Research, Knowledge Techniques, and the Politics of Sonic Thought As with many of the actors discussed in this book, Mach and Exner were responding to urgent sociopolitical, technological, industrial, and artistic challenges of their day. Their research agendas were expressly oriented on application, as becomes manifest in the rhetoric of much of the writing I examine. There, scientists and scholars try to connect with audiences both inside and outside the academy—confidently defining their fields as applied sciences, applied humanities, or more generally as disciplines with a self-evident impact on society. The notion of applied knowledge as I use it here goes back to the eighteenth century, when it designated practical, concretely applicable knowledge like that initially taught at the écoles polytechniques in France or the German academies of architecture, art, and commerce.34 Historians of science have discussed at length how the applied sciences subsequently became a component of nineteenth-century urban industry and then of various twentieth-century political systems.35 My analysis of the formation of applied research in many new acoustic disciplines at the turn of the twentieth century also draws on a series of recent studies on the genesis of musical acoustics, architectural acoustics, electroacoustics, urban acoustics, and bioacoustics.36 These studies address the fruitful cooperation of scholars in the natural sciences with instrument makers, musicians, architects, engineers, and bird-watchers, echoing a growing interest among historians of science in the structures of practical knowledge and the often long-term transfer of know-how both within and between nonacademic and academic fields of activity.37 I share this emphasis on the transfer of practical knowledge and expand it to include the formation of knowledge techniques in the sciences and humanities. There is virtually no research on developments in the applied humanities, programmatically named as such only in the past few decades and largely as a way of parrying the humanities’ much-invoked crisis by emphasizing their social impact.38 What I intend to show here is that the applied humanities took shape far earlier. Application-oriented research

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in the humanities is as old as the humanities themselves, but gained in prominence with new agendas in cultural and educational policy around 1900. To realize their applied research, humanities scholars profited from and created new institutions such as laboratories, studios, exhibition spaces, lecture theaters, and experimental stages. Auditory knowledge and sound-based research proved particularly well suited to bridge the academic and nonacademic realm, whether in the arts and architecture, language education and language planning, or the design and use of new media of communication.39 This bridging role involved a bidirectional transfer of practical auditory knowledge, though many of the academic disciplines addressed in this book also helped to shape techniques of knowledge. By using the term “knowledge techniques,” I aim to highlight techniques that do not emerge primarily in practice (as most practical knowledge does) and are not bound to particular professional domains or technologies (as scientific methods and skills are). Instead, they result from experimental research and theory building in the sciences and humanities and aim to intervene in specific cultural domains. Defined in this way, my notion of the knowledge technique differs from that of the “cultural technique,” which is useful to studying the emergence of broader techniques such as writing, reading, or measuring time.40 But similarly to cultural techniques, which evolve in tandem with certain technologies (thus, techniques of writing depend on writing technologies, and vice versa), the knowledge techniques addressed in this book depend on particular media and tools of research. This interdependency is exemplified by the technique of evenlysuspended attention developed by Sigmund Freud and his later psychoanalyst proponents and critics. Shaped by the concept of the auditory unconscious and the use of media such as notebooks, the technique was altered and elaborated by a series of twentieth-century psychotherapists. Another knowledge technique is presented in chapter 5, a phenomenon that attracted much attention in the interdisciplinary field of experimental aesthetics around 1900: “laryngal listening,” or more generally the muscle feelings that accompany inner speech, reading, and listening to music and theatrical arts. After showing how physiologists came to realize that human beings also use their larynx, lips, and tongue to listen to and think about sonic phenomena, I trace the development of new, humanitiesbased approaches to such muscle feelings in musicology, literary studies, and theater studies in early twentieth-century Berlin. Crucial to that story are the Institute of Psychology directed by Carl Stumpf, Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory for experimental psychology and Eduard Sievers’s chair of philology at the University of Leipzig, and the University of Berlin’s Institute

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of Theater Studies founded by Max Herrmann and Julius Peters. The personal networks among these enterprises show how strongly the humanities of the period relied on collaboration between academic and nonacademic institutions. The scholars involved called on the whole spectrum of available research technologies (inspection tools, laryngographs, other graphical recording devices) and research methods (laboratory experiments, introspection, surveys, interviews, field observation) to investigate and create new techniques of aesthetic perception. Drawn in part from artistic practice and shaped through scientific and humanistic research, these knowledge techniques claimed their own place at the vanguard of art and politics. Chapter 6 investigates the élan with which the scolars in applied sciences and humanities around 1900 pursued decidedly political agendas. That intellectual energy took material shape in the work of the founder of phoniatry, Hermann Gutzmann. Gutzmann’s constant refinement of his therapeutic methods by means of the phonograph offers a perfect example of the “co-construction of users and technology”41 as described by recent work in science and technology studies (STS) on the adaptation of technologies by different scientific users. As a tinkerer, inventor, and public speaker, Gutzmann deployed the phonograph with great flexibility, if not opportunism, to promote his concept of “neurological gymnastics,” aiming to repeatedly stimulate and thereby gradually change the language faculties in the subject’s brain. If Gutzmann’s methods, still accepted today, helped to heal disorders of the voice and language, they also set up norms and rules for new techniques of speaking during and immediately after the First World War. I illustrate this by situating his ideas in the context of early twentiethcentury Berlin, when phonetician Wilhelm Doegen, linguist Theodor Siebs, and musicologist Georg Schünemann adapted earlier methods of speech therapy to mold and standardize the speech of foreign-language students, schoolteachers, actors, and radio announcers. This expansive praxis of working with the sound of speech would unfold great sociopolitical potency. Together, the five main chapters of this book explore the wide range of emerging disciplines that were concerned with concepts and techniques of auditory cognition at the turn of the twentieth century. As we will see, this concern arose out of new neuroscientific findings and new audio technologies, the challenge of discipline building in the sciences and humanities, and an appeal from the outside world to change social praxis and thought by means of sound. Methodologically, Thinking with Sound calls for a new history of knowl-

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edge that combines intellectual history with the histories of science, media, and technology. Media studies early on examined acoustic media and their internal logics, retracing the associated discursive formations mainly with an eye to large-scale epistemes or paradigms. STS responded by addressing locally specific practices and skills in audio technology, though largely disregarding those practices’ lineages and epistemic settings. The history of science, by contrast, defined itself for a long time as an explicitly text-based—or, since the “iconic turn,” image-based—subject. During the past two decades, historians of science have begun to address soundbased research objects and instruments as well, but their historiographical framework has privileged the modern natural sciences over the humanities. Even so, the history of science offers a toolbox of methodologies that make it possible to combine a microhistorical view on research practices and more specific knowledge techniques with a macrohistorical perspective on long-term processes of transfer within, between, and out of the various fields of knowledge. As historiographers lend an ear to these past fields of knowledge, up close and from afar, new connections between well-known lines of intellectual history and almost forgotten bodies of knowledge become discernible.

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2

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The Sonic Unconscious N e u r opat hol o g y a n d P s yc hoa n a ly s i s

Today, Sigmund Freud’s name is inseparable from his “talking cure,” a psychoanalytic praxis that has reached the ripe old age of one hundred and that highlights Freud’s efforts to make a patient’s intimate, inner speech audible. Freud’s method is often illustrated in psychoanalytic literature by his Viennese office’s famous couch, the gift of a patient.1 During sessions, the patient would lie down on the couch and have no eye contact with the psychoanalyst, who would take a seat at his desk a few yards away or, later in his life, as he became increasingly hard of hearing, move his chair up close. In both versions of the arrangement, Freud would sit behind the patient, seeing him or her without being seen himself.2 For the patient, the sense of talking into empty space would let loose a veritable river of words as the unconscious began to speak. In this chapter, I revisit the genesis of the “talking cure” with the aim of linking Freud’s work on the unconscious to a broader discourse on auditory cognition in the late nineteenth century. I first look at Freud’s early career in the 1880s, when the young medical scholar worked at the Vienna General Hospital’s new psychiatric clinic, under the guidance of neuroanatomist Theodor Meynert. During this time, Freud became interested in aphasia—a form of language impairment associated in those days with an injury of (usually) the left side of the brain and regarded as key to understanding the relationship between the brain and the faculty of inner and outer speech. Freud published a monograph on the subject, but not before spending a semester studying with the eminent Parisian psychopathologist Jean-Martin Charcot at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in winter 1884–85. Freud found Charcot’s work important because of its novel treatment of what Charcot called “hysteria,” but also it inspired Freud’s interest in the cerebral processing of auditory information, and especially in the

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“acoustic element” of neurosis. Early on, however, Freud disputed many of Charcot’s views. Far more crucial to Freud’s later work was a colleague of Charcot’s, the physiologist Gilbert Ballet, who had published several studies on “inner language” in the 1880s. For Ballet, inner language was a boundary object, bringing together classic philosophy (or new readings of philosophical writings on humans as linguistic beings) and new methods and technologies of brain research. Freud not only adopted these multiple approaches to inner language, but also shared Ballet’s ideas on the intricate relationships between language, sound, and the unconscious. Building on the work of his Viennese and Parisian colleagues, Freud established an influential concept of the sonic unconscious and a technique to put the unconscious into words. The resulting praxis, the talking cure, found eager followers and equally insistent critics. Central to this long-lasting disagreement among psychotherapists was, as I will show at the end of this chapter, the question of who or which discipline in the sciences and humanities is best equipped to make the unconscious speak.

Brains That Talk The talking cure owed its emergence to a history of discipline-switching throughout Freud’s early career. Freud studied medicine while attending philosophy seminars and pursued his doctoral studies at the University of Vienna’s physiology department under Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke. To make a living, he also worked at Brücke’s laboratory until he graduated at the age of twenty-five. Freud would have liked to continue in physiology, but he came from a modest background, and it seemed more realistic to aim for professional experience in neurology and, ultimately, a lucrative private psychiatric practice. In 1883, after various temporary posts, he started work as an intern in the psychiatric ward of the General Hospital in Vienna, where he carried out research in the laboratory of cerebral anatomy.3 The lab was directed by neuroanatomist Theodor Meynert, one of the pioneers of somatic psychiatry, a new research field guided by the idea that psychological disorders have somatic causes. Meynert was influenced by the “Second Vienna Medical School,” whose exponents no longer regarded mental illness as the expression of complex emotional states.4 Following the new “somaticist paradigm,”5 they postulated the existence of lesions that could be precisely, physically localized.6 Meynert burrowed even deeper into the body’s interior and combined the Vienna School’s ideas with the new brain research of the era. In terms of institu-

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tional history, Meynert’s approach came to full fruition in 1870, when he was appointed director of the Vienna General Hospital’s new psychiatric clinic—the later workplace of Sigmund Freud. But in intellectual terms, it occurred a little earlier. In 1866, Meynert had already begun work as prosector at the Insane Asylum of Lower Austria. In this role, also in 1866, Meynert published the paper mentioned in chapter 1, “Ein Fall von Sprachstörung, anatomisch begründet” (A case of speech disturbance, explained anatomically), about a young woman with speech disorders who had died soon after being admitted to the clinic. During the autopsy, Meynert discovered softened discolorations in the area of the left temporal gyrus, at the walls of the Sylvian fissure that separates the parietal from the temporal lobe and is connected to the auditory nerve by the fibers of what Meynert called the Acusticusstrang, or acoustic cord. This location, impossible to demarcate precisely by anatomical means, was described vaguely by Meynert as a “sound field [Klangfeld] that is related to the ability to speak.”7 Lesions of that field, it seemed, cause speech disorders. Today, the area is known as the auditory cortex and is considered crucial for all kinds of sonic thoughts. But at the time of Meynert’s discovery, the localization of linguistic and other faculties in the brain was a contested field of research.8 The discovery reinvigorated a much older debate going back to the studies of physician and anatomist Franz Josef Gall. Gall, who worked in Vienna from 1781 to 1805 and then in Paris, was renowned for his collections of skulls and of plaster and wax models of brains; most attention, however, was attracted by his attempts to assign particular, circumscribed sections of the cerebral cortex to particular cognitive capacities, sensations, inclinations, and drives. He located the sense of language, for example, in the orbital region of the frontal lobes.9 Gall’s work met with distinguished and long-standing opposition. In the 1820s, French physiologist Pierre Flourens applied new, experimental methods of ablation and stimulation to the brains of birds to demonstrate that the cortex cannot, as Gall claimed, be divided up into functional areas. Instead, argued Flourens, all areas of the brain are interconnected; more fundamentally, cognitive faculties are not found within the brain at all.10 Flourens was confirming the Cartesian body-mind dualism, which remained firmly in place well into the 1860s and strictly rejected the localization of cognitive faculties in the human brain.11 It was only in 1861 that French surgeon and anthropologist Pierre Paul Broca tried to localize the faculty of speech in general terms, beginning the search for more sophisticated distinctions. Broca recounted the case

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Figure 2.1: Monsieur Leborgne’s brain, examined by Paul Broca postmortem to identify a physical cause of aphasia. The specimen was displayed at the Musée Dupuytren in Paris from 1861 to 2016; it is now part of the medical collections of the Sorbonne Université in Paris. Collections d’anatomie pathologique Dupuytren, Pôle Patrimoine, Direction des bibliothèques de Sorbonne Université, Pierre Kitmacher.

of a fifty-one-year-old patient called Leborgne, who for many years had suffered from epilepsy followed by paralysis of the right-hand side of his body. Leborgne could only utter the repeated syllable “tan tan,” earning him the nickname “Monsieur Tan.” When Leborgne died of a phlegmon, the autopsy of his brain showed a lesion in the posterior part of the third frontal gyrus.12 Broca concluded that this region (today known as Broca’s area) is responsible for the ability to speak.13 Leborgne’s brain was deposited at the Musée Dupuytren and is still preserved there today (figure 2.1).

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Just four years after Broca’s publication, it was Theodor Meynert who succeeded in providing his first, if approximate, localization of the auditory cortex. But Meynert hesitated to go further and assert the existence of “mental representations” or even “masses of mental images” stored as such in the cortex and simply waiting to be called up or replaced.14 Instead, he exhorted his colleagues to find firmer evidence for the sound field whose existence he suspected: “Define it, and delimit it.”15 The challenge was taken up by psychiatrist Carl Wernicke, who intervened from Breslau (today’s Wrocław) with a fresh and more detailed attempt to localize the faculties of language. In his 1874 study Der aphasische Symptomencomplex (The aphasia symptom complex), Wernicke examined several different aphasic clinical pictures and identified four brain areas responsible for the production and processing of what he called auditory images, motor images, tactile images, and optical images (figure 2.2). These centers, argued Wernicke, are associated by bundles of nerve fibers that form a “mediating psychic reflex arc.”16 Wernicke identified the pathway between the center of motor images and the center of acoustic images as the most necessary condition for linguistic concepts to take shape.17 In

Figure 2.2: The four brain areas responsible for speech, according to Wernicke: (a) the left first temporal convolution (Wernicke’s area, today the auditory cortex); another, extensive area storing (b) motor images of speech production and (d) the optical images of speech production; and (c) the left third frontal convolution (Broca’s area), the center responsible for tactile images. From Carl Wernicke, Der aphasische Symptomenkomplex: Eine psychologische Studie auf anatomischer Basis (Breslau: Max Cohn & Weigert, 1874), 23. © Universitätsbibliothek der HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin, Historische Sammlungen: Iw 40074:F8.

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his view, lesions in particular centers (or in the arcs that link them) are the cause of aphasia. Wernicke’s model of the four language areas would become mainstream opinion in aphasia studies over the course of the nineteenth century. Meynert, too, would build on Wernicke’s Der aphasische Symptomencomplex, arguing that larger complexes of associations, not specific brain areas alone, are responsible for the faculty of speech—projection fibers pass sensory impressions on to the cerebral cortex and store them in projection fields, while association fibers link these impressions together and store frequent connections.18 Based as he was in Meynert’s laboratory, Sigmund Freud might have been expected to immediately adopt and expand on the many new association theories proposed by his mentor and others. But Freud did not quite warm to neuroanatomical research at this stage, especially in career terms, since “from the material point of view, brain anatomy was certainly no better than physiology.”19 It was only some years later, in his first monograph, On Aphasia (1953; Zur Auffassung der Aphasie, 1891), that he returned to the question of whether cognitive faculties can be localized in the brain or, as the critics argued, the mind works independently in parallel to the brain.20 Freud came up with a third view of how human brains process inner and outer speech, one that would become crucial for his later theory of the unconscious and that was much influenced by his visit to Paris.21

Auditory Triggers In 1885, Freud completed his professorial qualifications in neuropathology and took a teaching post at the University of Vienna. Despite his general lack of enthusiasm for neuropathology, he did identify one luminary in the field: “In the distance shone the great name of Charcot.”22 Shortly after commencing his post, Freud was offered a travel grant by the University of Vienna’s medical faculty and spent the period from October 1885 to February 1886 with Charcot in Paris. Freud’s letters to his fiancée and her sister show an ambivalent response to the French metropolis—he called it “a vast overdressed Sphinx who gobbles up every foreigner unable to solve her riddles.”23 That impression was initially reinforced by Freud’s experiences at the Salpêtrière. By the late nineteenth century, the clinic on boulevard Saint-Germain had become the largest of its kind in France. Soon after he arrived, Freud was given a tour of the building by Charcot himself. He had never, he said, encountered such an extensive clinic or such a diversity of illnesses.24 Autopsy and the anatomical localization of brain pathologies took

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pride of place at the Salpêtrière just as they did in the German-speaking institutions of Meynert and Wernicke. A lively exchange of views had arisen between the French neuroanatomists Charcot and Broca in the 1860s,25 and Charcot later worked on his own cartography of the faculties of speech and memory in the brain, a model that basically corresponded with Wernicke’s.26 As director of the neurological department, however, Charcot’s main interest was in combining neuroanatomical brain surgery with the study of living patients, especially those who presented the symptom complex of the neurosis known as “grand hysteria” (grande hystérie, hysteria major).27 Working with neurotics, the Salpêtrière physicians practiced a form of visual diagnostics for which Charcot’s mentor Claude Bernard had coined the term “induced or active observation” (observation provoquée ou active), the procedure of provoking symptoms or neural alterations in order to study them.28 This observation was accompanied by work to perfect the more traditional procedures of hypnosis, including the stimulation of “hysterogenic zones” and the fixed gaze into a patient’s eyes.29 Special importance was attached here to public display of patients during Charcot’s lectures, documented in written reports and large-format photographs. As the extensive historical scholarship has shown, the definitional drive of Salpêtrière’s methods was what made the field of neuropathology a “discipline” in all senses of the word.30 But Charcot’s approach was not limited to the visual techniques of provocation, observation, and representation, today identified as the key tools in his “invention of hysteria.”31 He also favored the use of acoustic instruments such as tuning forks, bells, and enormous gongs to send “grand hysteria” sufferers into the three hypnotic states he defined as catalepsy, lethargy, and somnambulism.32 One such model experiment, which Freud most probably watched in person during his stay at the Salpêtrière, is shown in figure 2.3. A huge tuning fork, mounted on a resonance box, is set in motion by a wooden stick or a violin bow and produces sixty-four vibrations per second (at the time defined C2 or Low C). The patient immediately falls into catalepsy. Despite her open eyes, she appears absent, her limbs rigid and her posture fixed. “If the tuning fork’s vibration is stopped abruptly, the patients immediately utter a laryngeal sound, their limbs twitch into resolution, and they fall into lethargy.”33 Instead of using commercial tuning forks, the Salpêtrière clinicians developed their own instruments, tailoring them to Charcot’s needs with great acoustical and technical expertise. The leading figure in tuning-fork manufacture was the German instrument maker Rudolph Koenig, who opened his Parisian atelier on the quai d’Anjou, île Saint-Louis—little

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Figure 2.3: Catalepsy induced by a very large tuning fork, as shown in the documentary album by Désiré-Magloire Bourneville and Paul Regnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Service de M. Charcot), vol. 3 (Paris: Bureaux du Progrès Médical, 1879–80), plate 20.

more than a mile away from the Salpêtrière—in 1858.34 Koenig’s tuning forks included large instruments, such as a set of fifty-six forks ranging from 64 to 4096 cps, of which the lowest were 30 inches long and weighed around 290 pounds.35 Although Koenig was not the direct source of the tuning forks used by Charcot, his influence on their fabrication is palpable.36 Koenig’s tuning forks, however, were made of steel, whereas Charcot

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refers to forks made of bell metal, an alloy of copper and tin in a ratio of approximately four to one that is softer than steel and thus produces a richer tone color.37 They were made by Romain Vigouroux, head of the electrotherapy lab at the Salpêtrière. Unlike Charcot, Vigouroux saw little relevance in the timbre as determined by the material of the forks; more important, he believed, were the size and other properties of the resonance box that directly touched and stimulated the patients.38 Several aspects of Charcot’s use of tuning forks are important in the present context. Originally designed for tuning musical instruments, tuning forks generate stable, long-lasting, and distinct tones. They proved to be ideally suited for hearing tests,39 while also playing a pivotal role in the international quest to standardize musical pitches at the time.40 Charcot exploited this dual role of the tuning fork, using the instrument to test and standardize mental illnesses. His patients were to be reliably disciplined and normalized, and experiments had shown that extra-large, extra-soft, and highly vibrant tuning forks and gongs were an effective means to this end, particularly among test subjects already accustomed to hypnosis: they recognized the powerful sounds, and thus remembered them more easily.41 Such patients fell into hypnosis upon merely hearing the instruments in the next room or on the street, or after sounding them accidentally. Charcot explained this triggering effect with a theory of memory types that would become central to his school of neuropathology, including Freud’s later work. According to Charcot, some people have an especially pronounced acoustic memory, others a stronger visual or motor memory.42 In his lectures on aphasia, Charcot contended that these memory faculties are not set in stone; they can be practiced, expanded, and altered. The “bell model” that Charcot used to show how one memory faculty can step in for another would later be reproduced by his student Gilbert Ballet in Le langage intérieur (figure 2.4). In this much-cited diagram, thinking of a bell is not a one-off thought, but the outcome of a process of association between different memory centers in the human brain. For the first time, and well before Meynert’s theory of neuroanatomical associations, Charcot thus situated processes of auditory cognition within a more complex associationist theory. That theory was not new—it derived from David Hartley’s mid-eighteenth-century hypothesis of four interacting faculties of speech, making use of the eyes, ears, hands, and mouth.43 But Charcot combined associationism with brain research and with his method of induced observation. His choice of the motif of a bell is also telling. It recalls his hypnosis experiments at the Salpêtrière, which used instruments (whether bells, tuning forks, or gongs) made of

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Figure 2.4: According to Charcot’s bell model, memories of the sound of a bell and the sound of the word “bell” become associated in the brain with visual memories of bells, the written image “bell,” and motor memories of uttering the word “bell.” The model is reproduced in Gilbert Ballet, Le langage intérieur et les diverses formes de l’aphasie, 2nd ed. (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1888), 7. Bibliothèque National de France, gallica.bnf.fr.

bell metal. The patients’ memories of these instruments—to be exact, the well-rehearsed association between auditory, tactile, and visual memories of their sound—were what guaranteed the success of the dramatic performances in the auditorium.44 Auditory triggers such as the sound of bell metal or of a spoken word would become an important element of Freud’s later practice of the talking cure, and Freud’s theoretical view of the unconscious also profited

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from Charcot’s bell model. In the winter of 1885–86, Freud began to attend Charcot’s lectures, which were generally regarded as sensational, exhibitionist, and deeply imbued with French theatrical culture.45 Freud tried to gain a more nuanced view of Charcot’s approach to his patients but could not entirely resist the sway of the professor’s unconventional methods. “Charcot, who is one of the greatest of physicians and a man whose common sense borders on genius, is simply wrecking all my aims and opinions,” he wrote in November 1885. “I sometimes come out of his lectures as from out of Nôtre Dame, with an entirely new idea about perfection.”46 Each of Charcot’s lectures, Freud noted later, “made such an impression that for the rest of the day one could not get the sound of what he had said out of one’s ears.”47 Obviously, the young physician was all ears. In a bid to get closer to Charcot, Freud offered to translate his Leçons sur les maladies du système nerveux (Lectures on the diseases of the nervous system), which had not yet been published even in French and were “barely accessible at all” to Freud’s German-speaking colleagues.48 It was a less-than-altruistic offer that Freud hoped could gain him “advantageous entry” into the circles of German medical men—this, at least, was his blunt assessment in the draft of a letter to Charcot in December 1885. The final letter is lost. Presumably it was worded more circumspectly than the draft, because just three days later, Charcot confidently agreed to the translation project.49 In early 1886, he also invited Freud to the private soirées held in his sumptuous apartment on boulevard Saint-Germain.50 Among Freud’s fellow guests at these prestigious events would have been Gilbert Ballet.

Making Patients Talk Ballet ranks among the less prominent disciples of Charcot’s circle, and his influence on Freud has largely been neglected. After studying medicine in Limoges, Ballet held various positions as a physician at Parisian hospitals. From 1877, he worked at the Salpêtrière, where Charcot soon appointed him chief resident, chef de clinique.51 Ballet’s work entered the fierce dispute among neuroanatomists over the localization of linguistic faculties in the brain but signaled a new approach. When Freud came to visit the Salpêtrière, Ballet was preparing to submit his professorial dissertation Le langage intérieur et les diverses formes de l’aphasie (Inner language and the various forms of aphasia, published in 1886 with a revised edition in 1888). In this study, Ballet followed the lead of Wernicke, Meynert, and Charcot at least to an extent, likewise examining and drawing a map of the brain. In his case, it shows motor representations in the

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third left frontal convolution, auditory representations in the left first and second temporal convolution, and visual representations in the inferior parietal lobule.52 But Ballet cast doubt on his own cartography, considering it impossible to exactly localize the pathways of association between the centers and the brain stem.53 Even before writing Le langage intérieur, Ballet had been the first to study linguistic abilities through in vivo experiments— neuroanatomists had previously investigated them only through postmortem dissections of brain matter. The series of experiments that Ballet carried out at the Salpêtrière in 1880 built on Charcot’s method of “induced observation,” but instead of tuning forks, Ballet used flashes of light for the unilateral stimulation of just one eye. The Iconographie collection that records the Salpêtrière lectures shows three similar experiments, in which patients are sent into a cataleptic state by a very bright flash of light (figure 2.5).54 Explaining the utility of his method, Ballet noted that he wished to test under hypnosis whether the area of the brain identified by the neuroanatomist Broca—the third frontal convolution—really is responsible for the human ability to speak.55 To this end, he first put patients into a somnambulant state by having them gaze with concentration at a fountain pen. The patients were hypnotized but able to answer questions, count, recite verses, sing, and raise their hands. Ballet then stimulated one of their eyes with a flashlight, sending half of the body into a rigid, cataleptic state. When he stimulated the left eye, the left hemisphere of the brain remained in the somnambulant state, while the right hemisphere passed into the cataleptic state; the patient’s capacity for communication remained in place. When he stimulated the patient’s right eye, the left hemisphere was activated and the capacity for language was suspended. With his in vivo method, argued Ballet, it might not be possible to localize language precisely, but it is possible to situate particular speech practices in the left hemisphere. This was a first step in Ballet’s lifelong research into linguistic faculties in the brain, and on methods for turning inner speech inside out.

Suppressed Speech While Ballet was writing Le langage intérieur, he engaged with the vast literature on aphasia, including that of Adolf Kussmaul, a psychologist teaching at Strasbourg and a prominent critic of the attempts to localize cognitive processes in the brain that were so popular in his day. “Such a thing as a simple ‘centre of language’ or ‘seat of speech’ does not exist in

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Figure 2.5: Catalepsy induced by light, shown in Désiré-Magloire Bourneville and Paul Regnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Service de M. Charcot), vol. 3 (Paris: Bureaux du Progrès Médical, 1879–80), plate 37.

the brain,” admonished Kussmaul.56 He believed that the processing and reproduction of language is not possible to localize.57 Anatomically, the “central organ of speech” is, in Kussmaul’s view, composed of numerous areas and associative pathways spatially distributed across the cerebrum, cerebellum, and spinal cord.58 What Meynert called a “sound field,” Kussmaul more cautiously referred to as a “basal phonic

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centre,” which serves to process articulated and unarticulated sounds and is not necessarily identical to the “centre for articulate utterance.” In this vein he identified, somewhat vaguely, a “reflex-centre” located “below the corpora quadrigemina, its lower limit in the cord coinciding with that of the respiratory centre.”59 Despite the different nomenclature, Kussmaul attributed as much importance to these various cerebral areas as Meynert did to the “sound field,” for all perceptions are translated into sounds and expressed by the internal and external hearing of those sounds.60 Internal hearing or “suppressed speech,” furthermore, forms a constant and necessary accompaniment to thought.61 Kussmaul’s theory of “suppressed speech” was important to Gilbert Ballet precisely because it has no need of any exact anatomical localizations in the brain. More generally, Kussmaul sketched out an early theory of brain plasticity: the abilities to speak and remember take shape only gradually, over the course of a child’s development, through the practice of suppressed speech and outer articulation.62 Even in adults, the speech faculties required to develop practices of language—listening, reading, writing, and so on—vary from one individual to another and are malleable.63 If hesitantly, Ballet adopted Kussmaul’s ideas. His study names two language-related centripetal centers (an acoustic word comprehension center and an optical reading center) and two centrifugal pathway mechanisms (speaking, writing). Based on these, and again recalling Kussmaul, Ballet then discusses different practices of individually variable linguistic communication, such as articulation, writing, repetition, aural comprehension, and reading comprehension.64 Ballet differs from Kussmaul, however, in seeking to understand these linguistic practices and the role played in them by “suppressed speech” not only through observation of his patients, but also by the method of “observation intérieure,” introspection.65 The evidential credibility of introspection, one of psychology’s most long-standing methods, had been in decline since philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that “observation by itself already changes and displaces the state of the observed object” and that self-observation is such a subjective method that it will never result in a dispassionate and generally valid “science of the soul.”66 As Kant’s critique of introspection gained ground over the course of the nineteenth century, the search was on for objective and collective methods of observation. In psychology, prime among the sites of the search for objectivity was the Salpêtrière hospital. “The psychologist of the past,” Charcot had remarked, “locked himself in his study, he looked into himself, he was his own object of observation. This method may have had its advantages, but it was entirely insufficient.

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In order to monitor such observation of man by himself, an inverse observation is required—and in this inverse observation, neuropathology plays a considerable role.”67 Surely not innocent of allusion to his teacher Charcot and his various methods of collective patient observation, Ballet, by contrast, cordially recommended “the moment of quiet thought in the silence of the study.”68 Given his affiliation, it is fair to read Ballet’s words as an implicit methodological attack on the Salpêtrière School, or, at least, as a search for alternative methods to observe both “pathological” and “normal” trains of thought.69 Ballet noted in Le langage intérieur that observing one’s own interior speech requires a “certain state of stimulation of the brain functions.”70 His book takes the reader on a ramble through the author’s own daily routines, pointing out that the most favorable circumstance for “conscious observation” is that of “active and conscious ideation.”71 The impressions of the day are often reproduced and processed in the evening, before we go to sleep or in quiet moments. Our own and other people’s voices can then “take root in our brain.”72 Ballet described how his favorite actors seemed to speak to him in his mind’s ear, hours after leaving the theater (see chapter 1); and he found that when reading or quietly contemplating, he often heard “a murmuring that no longer has the features of my own voice, but those of the imaginary words.”73 These are by no means necessarily a faithful reproduction of the sonic environment: “The mental hearing of words takes its components from the collection of auditory word-images that we have acquired, and those images have very different characteristics depending on the nature of the sensation of which they are the residue.”74 They do not rest simply upon contents called up from the memory; inner concepts (whether acoustic, visual, or motor images) are constantly reconfigured through new associations, and “inner speech” bubbles up unsolicited and uncontrollable.75 Charcot’s bell diagram addresses these dynamic processes of association, but whereas Charcot’s model shows an “intellectual center” where all associations converge, Ballet was far more interested in the unconscious processes by which interior speech is shaped and reshaped. This unconscious form of interior speech, he concluded, serves as the basis for human thought and external speech. For Ballet, interior speech thus unconsciously mediates between the realm of the physical (speech) and the psyche (human thought and feelings) and helps to structure both. In this structure-oriented view of interior speech, Ballet was inspired by Paris psychologist Victor Egger’s study La parole intérieure (1881).76 I will return to Egger’s work in chapter 3 because it was also crucial for Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of speech and

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language. For the moment, though, it is important to note that Ballet went even further than Egger by distinguishing between inner speech (parole intérieure), which is generated solely from auditory images, and interior language (langage intérieur), which involves all kinds of memory images (visual, gestural, verbal) and results in a more general linguistic capacity.77 Nevertheless, Ballet agreed with Egger that auditory word-images dominate the interior language of most people, and he called on his readers to bear virtual witness to his theory by observing themselves carefully. “It will generally (save in exceptional cases) become obvious,” predicted Ballet, “what a vital role in reflection is played, for most of us, by auditory verbal images. We actually hear the words that express our thought, as if an interior voice were speaking them quietly in our ear.”78 The interior prompter described by Ballet was soon echoed in Freud’s writings on word-presentations and the sonic unconscious. Before I turn back to the Viennese physician, it is worth looking at two more methods introduced by Ballet to track down the nature of interior language.

Listening to Books Sequestered in his study, Ballet did not talk only with himself. Historical figures also populated his desk, and the first chapter of his Le langage intérieur offers a rather abbreviated tour through the history of the philosophy of language. This focus is again somewhat unexpected, given that in disciplinary terms the Salpêtrière School was affiliated not with the humanities but with the natural sciences, and trusted less in historical epistemes than in the here-and-now of empirical research. In his Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale of 1862, for example, Claude Bernard had argued that science “varies and perfects itself in proportion to the increase of acquired knowledge. Present-day science is thus necessarily higher than the science of the past; and there is no sort of reason for going in search of any addition to modern science through knowledge of the ancients.” Bernard warned the advocates of modern medicine that although it is useful to gain some approximate knowledge of the history of medicine, the research should not be taken too far. The study of books is liable to “dry up” the freshness of one’s approach to living material, stifling inventiveness and originality.79 Charcot and his early students followed that maxim, but Ballet was of a different opinion. Despite praising Charcot’s neuropathology as an innovative field that successfully united brain pathology and experimental psychology, Ballet believed that the bridge connecting current neuropathology to these early achievements had been demolished. He wished to rebuild it.

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All the more surprising, therefore, is Ballet’s remark that “the history of the auditory representation of words, as an intellectual process preceding external language and, for many people, one of its preconditions, is in reality very modern”—pertinent comments being found only among “the philosophers of our century.”80 In fact, Western philosophy’s thinking about the relationship between the logical structure of “external discourse” and “internal discourse,” or discourse “in the soul,” goes back to Platonism.81 Early comments specifically on the acoustic quality of inner speech can be found in the writings of Saint Augustine. To be sure, Augustine accorded primacy to the divine Word (doctrina divina), which lights up the human soul but has nothing in common with external language as perceived by the senses.82 This inward word is translatable into audible signs (imagines sonorum), however, and can find its way back inside via the external world. “For the words of all tongues that are uttered in sound are also silently thought, and the mind runs over verses while the bodily mouth is silent,”83 said Augustine, anticipating at least partially later theories of inner speech. These swathes of intellectual history were left untouched by Ballet, whose account begins with the advent of modernity and the dispute over the relative importance of external and internal discourse, words and thought. In France, a particularly radical position in this debate was formulated by the abbot and philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. For Condillac, thought begins with and in language, and logical thinking takes shape first and foremost in verbal form.84 Drawing on Condillac, the Swiss philosopher Charles Bonnet made the point more rigorously, asserting that every thought requires the help of words, even if these are spoken only silently inside the head.85 In the end, Ballet’s sympathies lay with those in France who, following Condillac and Bonnet, slightly relativized the parole intérieure model and asserted the existence of ideas prior to language. Most salient here was Antoine de Rivarol, also cited by Ballet. Rivarol postulated a primacy of ideas and feelings,86 only to declare the manifestation of linguistic concepts in the brain to be a precondition of higher forms of thought: “If speech is a thought manifesting itself, the thought must be an interior, hidden speech. The man who speaks, therefore, is the man who thinks on a very high level.”87 As a result, Rivarol concluded pointedly, it is not irrelevant which language a person speaks. Perfection of thought can only be achieved in the most subtle, detailed, and precise of all languages: French. The French philosopher Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald, presented by Ballet merely as a further authority on inner speech, reworked Rivarol’s hypothesis while defending an emphatically anti-sensualist position. “Man thinks his word (that is, he hears it mentally) before he speaks his

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thought,” claimed Bonald.88 He regarded interior language again as divine language, innate and antecedent to external language. Outer speech is “only a repetition—as it were, an echo”—of inner speech.89 Certainly, Ballet’s forays into the history of philosophy may be considered more of a gesture than a genuinely profound study of the subject. He overlooked key standpoints, frequently misunderstanding or truncating lines of thought. Nonetheless, Ballet’s reading gave him confirmation of what he had suspected as a neurologist and psychologist but had been unable to prove using the dual method of autopsy and introspection: a coexistence between innate ideas that are independent of language and higher forms of thought that are dependent on language. Ballet did not define innate ideas in Augustine’s sense of metaphysical innateness. What is preexistent, rather, is the brain as an “organ of potentiality.” In the process of language acquisition, the brain “is not a tabula rasa, it is not a completely passive organ in the act of knowledge.”90 The spoken words that enter from the exterior world enhance the clarity of thought; they are “auxiliaries of the idea,” which occasionally give it more sharpness and make it more “tractable,” but are not inseparable from the idea. “The idea,” philosophized Ballet, “can exist without the word that represents it, and indeed, it customarily comes into being without the word or before the word.”91 When intellectual processes crystallize out into particular concepts, however, they do so in the form of concrete images—“then we see, we touch, we feel the objects mentally; sometimes as verbal images, and these images, for most of us, primarily take the form of auditory verbal images.”92 The task of turning these auditory verbal images inside out ranked high on Ballet’s agenda.

Medicine’s Adjuncts: History and Literary Criticism In Le langage intérieur, Ballet tested a new style of reading classic literature—rather superficially, perhaps, but enough to plant the seeds of a new approach to neuropathology informed by historical writings. Stretching the point a little, one might even speculate that this historical interest also, in 1902, prompted him to help found the Société française d’histoire de la médecine, one of the world’s earliest societies for the history of medicine. After serving in several posts at Parisian psychiatric clinics (Saint-Antoine and Hôtel-Dieu), Ballet was appointed honorary professor of the history of medicine at the city’s medical faculty in 1907, where he was famed for his obsession with history (figure 2.6).93 Ballet’s interest was unabated when, in 1909, he succeeded Alix Joffroy to the Hôpital Sainte-Anne’s famous chair of clinical psychiatry and brain

Figure 2.6: Gilbert Ballet caricatured in the Revue Chanteclair as lost in the world of medical history. B. Moloch, Chanteclair 3, no. 25 (1908), 3. Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé (Paris).

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disorders, previously held by Charcot and Benjamin Ball.94 The same year, he was elected president of the Société and worked hard to establish a museum for the history of medicine.95 Ballet’s own work in the history of medicine was extensive.96 But it was not only substantive advice that he sought in the classics of historical medicine and philosophy: browsing these books, Ballet also discovered historical test subjects whose introspection itself offered him research material—patient files for the genre of the biographie psychologique.97 Ballet’s “medical-psychological history” Histoire médico-psychologique de Swedenborg (1899), for example, was a psychobiography of the alleged mystic Emanuel Swedberg (later Swedenborg). Ballet interpreted Swedenborg’s visionary writings as hallucinations, promising “to show less what Swedenborg thought than how he thought it.”98 Once again, Ballet attended particularly to a “langage cogitatif ” made up of visual, visualverbal (that is, written), motor, and, especially, acoustic hallucinations.99 Over the individual distinctions between his author-patients, he looked for transhistorical symptoms. “In this way,” wrote one of his students, “M. Ballet extracted from literary history a great clinical truth.”100 Quite en passant, therefore, Ballet had developed yet another research method. Since Freud, this has become known as psychoanalytical literary criticism. Present-day historians of science have tended to forget Ballet. For my purposes, however, he is significant for his work on inner language, which continued unbroken despite his frequent changes of institution, discipline, and research method. Starting with the anatomical study of language faculties (the dissection and localization of brain regions), Ballet moved on to experimental physiological work on living patients (the external stimulus of brain regions using light), a philosophically informed psychological self-observation (induced autosuggestion), then the study of texts in the history of philosophy and medicine (psychoanalytical literary studies). As we will see, Freud’s talking cure method owed its emergence to a mix of disciplinary approaches no less remarkable than—and partly inspired by—Ballet’s.

The Acoustic Element On returning to Vienna, Freud completed his translation of Charcot’s lectures, Vorlesungen über die Krankheiten des Nervensystems, and published it even before the original appeared in France.101 In his account of his visit to Paris, Freud also defended Charcot against the common aspersion that members of the Salpêtrière School were overly “inclined to study rare and strange material and to dramatize their working-up of that material.” He

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spoke appreciatively of Charcot’s skill in observation, the “repeated and unbiased efforts” of his senses, and his ability to interpret difficult-todecipher symptoms.102 These comments earned the young neurologist disapproval from more established colleagues—including Theodor Meynert, to whose laboratory Freud had initially returned.103 Access to the laboratory, and with it (temporarily) the option of teaching at the University of Vienna, was now blocked to him. An exasperated Freud left the Viennese Association of Physicians and concentrated on the private practice he had opened in 1886, initially with the aim of applying and refining Charcot’s methods of examination.104 His Viennese colleagues continued to eye Freud’s techniques of “hypnotic suggestion” for “neurotics” with suspicion,105 though Charcot tried to hearten him from afar: “Be reassured, [the analysis and therapy of] hysteria will find its way, and one day it will take up the glorious place in the sun that it deserves.”106 Charcot’s prophecy would be fulfilled, but by that point Freud had broken with his teacher’s views in several respects. In 1891, Freud finished his book On Aphasia, giving it the subtitle “A Critical Study.” In this work, Freud found fault with scholars including his mentors Meynert and Charcot for their clear-cut, functional separation between sensory centers and neural pathways.107 Equally critical was Freud’s view of attempts to localize the production of memory images in the brain. He considered it nonsensical to “immerse a nerve fibre, which over the whole length of its course has been only a physiological structure subject to physiological modifications, with its end in the psyche and to furnish this end with an idea or a memory.”108 Freud did, however, accept the existence of a vaguely defined “speech territory” in the form of large, overlapping areas of the cerebral cortex that together are responsible for processing sensory impressions.109 This intentionally imprecise neurophysiological explanation of the language domain may have been influenced by Gilbert Ballet. Like Ballet, Freud derived the emergence of word-images and object-images from the practices of speech and the resultant dynamic processes of association.110 Accordingly, Freud’s map of the language apparatus (figure 2.7) visualizes not relative anatomical positions, but processes of association whose formation is “of a complexity beyond comprehension.”111 Unlike Charcot and Ballet, Freud doubted that language processing varies from one individual to the next by memory type; he believed the “associative activity of the acoustic element” to be equally crucial for all human beings.112 These thoughts on the “acoustic element” would soon form the foundations of his theory of the sonic unconscious. It is only in On Aphasia that Freud refers to Ballet explicitly,113 yet Ballet’s work on the reciprocal formation

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Figure 2.7: Freud’s psychological schema of word-presentation. “Sound-images” take center stage in this schema, mediating between outer sensation and inner language. Freud drafted the schema for his first monograph, On Aphasia: A Critical Study (first published in German, 1891), translated by E. Stengel (New York: International Universities Press, 1953), 77.

of the unconscious and inner language had a lasting effect on Freud’s theoretical writings. In the years that followed the aphasia study, Freud continued to define himself as advocating a “psychology that shall be a natural science,”114 but neurophysiology entirely took the place of neuroanatomy in his research. In his “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” written in 1895 but published only posthumously, Freud began to elaborate a theory of conscious and unconscious thought through word-presentations. To counter his contemporaries’ attempts to simply localize human faculties in the brain, he described a trifold system of neural processing, comprising the processing of external stimuli, impermeability or the processing of endogenous stimuli, and the transformation of stimulus quantities into psychical qualities.115 Freud suspected that processes frequently repeated in the brain—such as the cognitive processing of words—cause lasting modifications by lowering the contact barriers between impermeable neurons. These modifications result in “facilitations” or Bahnungen, pre-broken paths or routes,116 which become the basis of primary sequences (the unconscious memory shaped by language) and complex migrations (reproductive, word-based thought processes) of associations. Seventy years later, Freud’s choice of the concept of facilitation, Bahnung, prompted philosopher Jacques Derrida to interpret the “Project for a Scientific Psychology” as a graphical account of the psychical apparatus. Freud, argued Derrida, saw the psyche as a “writing machine.”117 This

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machine produces difference through frayage—Derrida’s translation of Bahnung, which Alan Bass, in turn, translates as “breaching” new paths— and thereby creates a “landscape of writing” that cannot be explained by phonetic writing; rather than representing the exterior world, it operates via an originary system of inscription and difference.118 On the basis of such textual metaphors (“registration,” “retranscription”), Freud read the psyche as text, not as a physiological texture.119 Accordingly, the unconscious is an irreducible iconography or figurative script that unfolds over time, following its own rules.120 To be sure, a more detailed reading of Freud’s “Project” shows that word-presentations (Wortvorstellungen) are very much phonetic in nature. Synonymously termed “indications of speech” (Sprachzeichen), they do in fact bear the traces of the physical world of speech.121 More precisely, the genesis of word-presentations depends on the bidirectionality of the Bahnungen, which serve as the links connecting sensory perception with interior perception, unconscious with conscious material, and knowledge of the self with knowledge of the world. Due to this complex web, “thought accompanied by a cathexis of the indications of thought-reality or of the indications of speech is the highest, securest form of cognitive thought-process.”122 Thought, here, is tentatively defined as being attended by word-presentations, the suppressed sound of speech. Freud made this point more strongly in “The Ego and the Id” (1924). There, he situated word-presentations in the preconscious, as intermediaries between external perception and the unconscious. On the one hand, verbal “residues” or images “are derived primarily from auditory perceptions, so that the system Pcs. [preconscious] has, as it were, a special sensory source.”123 On the other, “internal thought processes” only become perceptible—that is, audible—through word-presentations. Verbal images, then, are what make “internal thought processes” perceptible—and as such, audible.124 Thus, the unconscious both results from cognitive language processing and intervenes in the constitution of verbal images. In the same essay, Freud further combined the three categories of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious with the triad of ego, superego, and id. The ego is now located in the preconscious. The routes from the ego to the exterior world, for Freud, once more pass through the auditory cortex and the sense of hearing. Freud made the engaging claim that “the ego wears a ‘cap of hearing’—on one side only, as we learn from cerebral anatomy. It might be said to wear it awry” (figure 2.8).125 The “hearing cap,” in this case sitting somewhat askew, was worn in the 1920s by pilots and telephone switchboard operators to leave their hands free when taking calls (figure 2.9).

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Figure 2.8: Freud’s topography of the psyche with a “hearing cap.” The ego is situated in the preconscious (Pcs.) and mediates between exterior and conscious perception (Pcpt.-Cs.) and between the unconscious and unconsciously repressed. The image appeared first in Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id” (first published in German in 1923), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 19:24.

Fitting the ego with a hearing cap, Freud stressed its constant availability for acoustic signals from the exterior world, which it then transfers to the superego. The ego is thus determined by verbal residues and “thinking in words.”126 Verbal representations, in turn, are the outcome of the ego’s encounters with the exterior world and a conversation initiated by the superego.127 Freud found it impossible to localize the superego in his topography,128 but defined it as an “ego ideal” that takes shape in the course of a lifetime and constantly whispers into the ego’s ear what the ego is expected to do, say, and not do. Like the telephone operator, it is at a switchboard: it constitutes itself in the process of sensory (that is, auditory) perceptions and the verbal encounter of the ego with the social world.129 At the same time, the superego channels the energy of the id’s drives into word-presentations. Thus, it is “as impossible for the super-ego as for the ego to disclaim its origin from things heard; for it is a part of the ego and remains accessible to consciousness by way of these [external] word-presentations (concepts, abstractions). But the cathectic energy does not reach these contents of the super-ego from auditory perception (instruction or reading) but from sources in the id.”130 By describing the ego, superego, and id as components of a telephone call, Freud replaced his physiological model of Bahnung—recalling practices of inscription—with a dynamic psychological model.131 The triad of the neuronal processing of stimuli is superseded by the triad of interior audio communication.

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To summarize, Freud’s theoretical writing is characterized by switches of discipline and changing concepts of the human psyche. What remains constant, though, is his engagement with the work of Charcot and Ballet. Like both his French colleagues, Freud was fascinated by the “acoustic element” of human cognition, starting with his early study On Aphasia. Much like Ballet, Freud avoided reducing verbal images to auditory wordimages. In the “Project,” he stressed the indefinite quality of verbal images, which are generated not by individual and irreversible facilitations, but by a process of constant transcription, circumscription, and reinscription. And like Ballet’s theory of inner language, Freud’s theory of the unconscious describes the verbal image as acting as a mediator between external

Figure 2.9: Hearing cap with integrated earphones used by German pilots. Photograph from Erich Niemann, Funkentelegraphie für Flugzeuge (Berlin: Richard Carl Schmidt, 1921), 166.

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language and the psyche. It regards verbal images as doubled and dynamic due to that mediatory role. In “The Ego and the Id,” Freud then reiterated his interest in auditory cognition by describing the ego as wearing a hearing cap. He further complicated the model by speaking of a triad of interior audio communication and attributed to that triad the capacity to shape and structure the psyche. Here, Freud clearly replaced his earlier neurophysiological theory of auditory cognition with a structuralist, psychological approach to the sonic conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, while nonetheless maintaining his interest in a heuristic but rather clear-cut distinction between the three categories. He stressed the interdependence of interior and exterior auditory experience, and of past and present sonic thoughts. This interdependence also distinguishes Freud’s stance from phenomenological positions such as Edmund Husserl’s. Husserl likewise showed an interest in the formation of auditory word-images and their use in both exterior communication and inner speech,132 but ultimately argued that such images never correspond with the true mental act of “thinking with sound.” Genuine interior speech, he contended in Logical Investigations of 1900–1901, is based not on mental imagery or “telling oneself anything,” but on conceiving of oneself as speaking and communicating—that is, on a phenomenological experience of one’s own voice.133 Some decades later, Jacques Derrida was to return to Freud’s complex triad of interior communication to oppose Husserl’s seemingly phonocentric identification of the human mental act with the interior speech act.134 For our purposes, it is important to note that Husserl aimed to establish his phenomenology, in contradistinction to the life sciences, as a discipline that studies not the psyche but the human mind, a Geisteswissenschaft in the strict sense of the word.135 Freud’s ambition, as we will see, was to establish a “philosophical auxiliary science” for the life sciences, one capable of listening to the stream of sonic thought that escapes the human mind.

The Sound of Dreams and the “Tick-Tock of Desire” In theory, Freud’s triadic structure of interior communication applies to healthy humans as much as to those suffering from psychic diseases. In practice, though, Freud emphasized cases where the triad was disturbed. After his spell in Paris, Freud talked regularly with Austrian physician Josef Breuer, who had been his mentor since their shared employment at Meynert’s laboratory. Breuer and Freud’s joint publication Studies in Hysteria appeared in 1895. It was in this collection that Breuer explained for the first time how traumas, or emotional insults to the brain, gener-

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ate abnormal facilitations and correspondingly abnormal reflex associations.136 The same year, Freud echoed this explanation in his “Project,” stating that pathological Bahnungen arise from traumatic experiences and entail unconscious repressions or abnormal associations.137 This account of abnormal associations meant taking another step back from Charcot, who regarded the entire family of neuropathologies—the famille névropathique, including hysteria—chiefly as a hereditary disorder rather than an anomaly caused by experiences.138 Freud had contradicted that view as early as 1892 in his translation of Charcot’s Leçons du mardi.139 Charcot responded with indignation at the time, and correspondence between the two men ceased abruptly.140 Freud nevertheless remained loyal to the French school, or at least to Ballet’s attempts at exteriorizing inner speech. It was not easy to turn the triadic structure of interior communication inside out and make the unconscious speak. According to Breuer and Freud, the psyche reveals itself most clearly in the patient’s nonverbal symptoms. Abnormal associations make themselves felt in a multiplicity of ways, among them the “tick-tock of desire” that Freud and Breuer described in many of their patient case studies—interesting in the present case for their acoustic character.141 The most famous case in that respect is that of “Anna O.” (Bertha Pappenheim), whom Breuer had treated from 1880 to 1882. Anna O. suffered from psychotic symptoms including an intense cough that first appeared during a vigil at her sick father’s bedside when she heard Viennese dance music coming from a neighboring house and wished she could join in the dancing. Since then, “she had reacted with a nervous cough throughout her whole illness, whenever she heard very rhythmic music.”142 Dance music was very popular in the 1890s, especially the fast and furious Viennese waltz music of Joseph Lanner, Johann Strauss the Elder and Younger, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Rhythmically simple but fast-moving (a three-quarter measure at approximately 60 beats per minute), the Viennese waltz required dancers to stress the first beat and passionately anticipate the second. The thrill of the waltz and the close contact of the dancers drew strong moral objections, often articulated as medical concerns over exertion, overheating, and dizziness.143 But the Viennese waltz was also an emblem of social revolution—what the contemporary music critic Eduard Hanslick called a “Marseillaise of the heart.”144 Anna O. did not understand how dance music could make her cough, but her reaction to the waltz became the key to Breuer’s diagnosis: “I could imagine that a conscience scruple could cause a contraction of the glottis, and the motor impulse, which this girl, so fond of dancing, experienced,

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could have changed the contraction of the glottis into a nervous cough.”145 Breuer chose to speak in the subjunctive mood, underlining that his diagnosis regarding Anna O.’s tanzlust was speculative. Freud, too, pointed out that patients’ symptoms were often very difficult to decipher. A tussis nervosa, for example, meant something different in each patient. In the case of Anna O. it was the desire to dance, or rather, Freud later surmised, the desire for physical closeness to her therapist, Breuer.146 The chronic cough of another patient turned out to be a sign of mourning for a much-loved dog that had suddenly died.147 Treating the hysteric patient “Dora,” who had suffered from nervous coughing since she was twelve years old, Freud interpreted the acoustic symptom as hinting at a deeply entangled cluster of desires. First, it was an indication of disgust, provoked by the embrace of a both secretly loved and much-detested family acquaintance, Herr K., who made Dora feel “the pressure of his erect member against her body.”148 That revolting feeling of pressure, concluded Freud, was repressed and replaced by “the innocent sensation of pressure upon her thorax, which in turn derived an excessive intensity from its repressed source.”149 Further conversations with Dora led Freud to believe that the nervous cough, second, articulated the loss of her revered father and the acquaintance’s wife, Frau K., also desired by Dora in homoerotic fantasies.150 Dora reported picturing “a scene of sexual gratification per os” between her father and Frau K.151 Through her constant coughing, Dora attempted to blow such fantasies away. All of these case studies showed Freud that acoustic symptoms did not have a single, easily interpreted meaning. Each patient seemed to unconsciously give them an individual sense. One important element of Freud’s methodology for capturing such individual meanings was the interpretation of dreams. In the dream, the dreamer translates unconscious material back into sensory images, or else develops new “dream-thoughts.”152 Once more, Freud emphasized acoustic signs. In the dream, he wrote, sound-images are loud and real, like auditory hallucinations. One hears the peal of church bells, the clopping of horses’ hooves, the chewing sounds and the clattering of silverware at a dinner table.153 Unconsciously heard melodies and long-forgotten nursery rhymes, too, return in dreams.154 The dreamer alone, though, is able to sense their meaning. It has even been speculated that the intensity of Freud’s interest in sonic dream images arose from the fact that his attention was first drawn to the possibility of interpreting dreams by an opera.155 In an 1897 letter to Berlin physician Wilhelm Fliess, Freud gave a glowing account of a visit to the Vienna State Opera to see Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger. He had

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been “sympathetically moved” by the recitation of the “morning dream interpretation melody” by the budding master singer Walther von Stolzing (sung by tenor Andreas Dippel). Freud described this musical interpretation of a dream enthusiastically: “As in no other opera, real ideas are set to music, with the tones of feeling attached to it lingering on as one reflects upon them.”156 Indeed, Walther’s prize-winning song, Morgendlich leuchtend im rosigen Schein, is preceded by ascending harp arpeggios that suggest a transition from night to day, from a state of deep sleep to the morning dream with its increasingly sharp dream images. The melody carries the singing voice in gently swaying movements up and down, mimicking a semiconscious state of mind between waking and dreaming, and thus creating a space for emotional reflection. Even Wagner’s harshest critic, Eduard Hanslick, appreciated the song for its “uncommonly beautiful, tender melody,” though not without querying its recurrence in the final act of the Meistersinger and Wagner’s creation of an “ocean of infinite melodies” more generally.157 Wagner himself invested much thought in the topos of dreaming. Influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer’s neuro-philosophical account of the “dream organ,” he drew an analogy between musical composition and the early morning dream as two immediate, nonrational, partly unconscious, and creative modes of translating the human will into a world that is imaginary but perceptible by all senses, and therefore real.158 In the Meistersinger, master singer Hans Sachs praises dreaming as a means of revealing man’s truest madness (“des Menschen wahrster Wahn”) and poetry as the interpretation of dreams of reality (“Wahrtraumdeuterei”). That Freud, too, extolled the prize song as a musical realization of “real ideas” and noted its deep impression in his mind is all the more striking given that he otherwise showed little interest in music, despite living in Europe’s preeminent musical city. He frequently stressed his lack of musicality, casually mentioning just a handful of opera visits.159 It is hardly surprising, though, that Wagner’s Meistersinger breaks the pattern of Freud’s usually distant attitude to music: after all, Hans Sachs’s assistance in putting Walther’s dream into poetic words in Act II of the opera prefigures Freud’s technique of listening to his patients’ dreams.160 In that technique, Freud cultivated a special ear for acoustic phenomena, auditory dream images, and, especially in his later work, the sound of the spoken word. Without stretching the point too far, Freud probably agreed with the distinction between the epistemic values of the human eye and ear that Wagner proposed in his 1849 essay “The Artwork of the Future.” As Wagner put it, the artistic subject has both an “outer self ” and an “inner self.” The subject presents its outer self to the eye, whereas the inner self

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“communicates most directly with the ear,” whether through the tone of voice or through the spoken word, “the voice condensed.”161 For Freud, the same was true of his patients: their “inner self ” whispered incessantly into their ears, day and night. For The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud asked his patients to verbalize and write down their dream images. He frequently cited the written records of patients’ dreams and his own dream notes, highlighting a further methodological proximity to Gilbert Ballet, who had introduced (or, rather, reintroduced) the Salpêtrière School to the techniques of psychoanalytical reading. Today, it is Freud’s readings of literary texts that exemplify the method—literary scholars have drawn attention to Freud’s interpretation of numerous written dream descriptions, but also of literary texts by Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Theodor Fontane, and many more.162 Another well-known example is Freud’s literary analysis of the memoirs of a psychotic jurist, Daniel Paul Schreber. It can hardly be coincidental that in the study of Schreber’s paranoia, executed without ever meeting the patient in person, it is once again an acoustic symptom that captured Freud’s attention: Schreber’s auditory hallucination of “talking birds,” which Freud interpreted as expressing fantasies of persecution.163 For the analyst to decode such symptoms, patients first had to be encouraged to write—but better still, to speak.

Putting the Unconscious into Words During their collaboration, Freud and Breuer became aware of the possibility of calling repressed knowledge into consciousness through speech, and the method gradually took on firmer contours.164 It was Breuer’s patient Anna O. who, after months of interviews with Breuer held mostly under hypnosis, “invented the good and serious name of ‘talking-cure,’” which she also humorously called “chimney sweeping.”165 Breuer and Freud based themselves on the new “cathartic method,” in which repression is replaced by linguistic abreaction.166 A true cathartic effect is achieved when a traumatized person reacts with an action such as revenge. “But man finds a substitute for this action in speech,” which allows the affect to be “abreacted (abreagirt).” When experienced by a healthy person, traumas can be overcome by the thought-work of “associative elaboration” and by abreaction through speech, allowing them to fade from memory.167 In severe neuroses, however, the associations are often repressed at the same time as the event itself (groups of ideas are split off in a state of autohypnosis, for example), or an experience is remembered all too clearly and in isolation

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because no associations could be formed.168 To revitalize those associations, to abrogate the power of “non-abreacted ideas” and bring ideas “to associative correction,” what is needed is the talking cure.169 During such talk, the unconscious is articulated not in intentional speech, but at the moments where speech stumbles: in throat-clearing, hysterical laughter and stammering, “lapsus linguae, errors in memory and speech, forgetting of names, etc.”170 Among these phenomena, Freud often also observed “mishearing [Verhören]—on the assumption, of course, that there is no organic disturbance of [the patient’s] powers of hearing.”171 Parapraxes of this kind occur at moments when “a person with sound eyes and ears” temporarily forgets something, represses it, or ignores it with a great effort of concentration.172 At this point, the unconscious steps in, following one of the many facilitated paths that have already been smoothed by “the influence of sounds, the similarity of words and the familiar associations aroused by words.”173 In these observations of unintentional speech or hearing, Freud found practical evidence for his theory of verbal images situated in the preconscious that allow the unconscious to interfere in external utterances. But Freud’s talk of unintentional speech and hearing also builds upon Charcot’s neurophysiological work on auditory memory, auditory triggers, and, more generally, the wide-ranging net of nonconscious word-associations illustrated in Charcot’s bell model. Like Ballet, Freud was interested in more than the associative clusters around single words: he wanted to make the unconscious speak for long stretches at a time. It was on this basis that Freud built his private practice in Vienna.

The Noise of the Couch In 1891, Freud moved into the apartment at Berggasse 19, where he usually saw his clients every day except Sundays for a fifty-five-minute session. His “psychoanalysis,” as he called it from 1896,174 was a process lasting many years, and an expensive one that only the well-off could afford. Freud wanted his client to take the therapy seriously; missed sessions had to be paid for.175 To accelerate the treatment, Freud’s clients lay down on the famous couch in his office. The couch was a trigger prompting them to talk, much as Charcot’s gongs, bells, and tuning forks had made the Salpêtrière patients fall into hypnotic states. Freud also experimented with hypnosis and with “pressure procedures” of suggestion (exerting pressure on the forehead),176 though he later worked mainly with verbal suggestion. Instead of targeted questioning, Freud now invited the patient to

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“abandon himself to a process of free association—that is, to say whatever came into his head, while ceasing to give any conscious direction to his thoughts.”177 The aim of the method was to externalize internal monologues in all their fragmentary and associative splendor. Freud wished to hear “everything that has to do with the clearing-up of a particular symptom.” That information “emerges piecemeal, woven into various contexts, and distributed over widely separated periods of time.”178 But how did he discover what really belonged together? In a well-known passage from “Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis” of 1912, Freud advised his colleagues to follow the technique of paying the same “evenly suspended attention” to everything that is said and heard during a therapy session.179 Rather than listening selectively, they must bear in mind that the meaning of the things heard is usually recognized only in retrospect.180 An equally celebrated passage compares Freud’s listening technique with a telephone conversation. The physician “must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone. Just as the receiver converts back into sound waves the electric oscillations in the telephone line which were set up by sound waves, so the doctor’s unconscious is able, from the derivatives of the unconscious which are communicated to him, to reconstruct that unconscious, which has determined the patient’s free associations.”181 Media scholars have taken these words as an opportunity to stress the impact of telephony—a technology still young in 1900—on psychoanalysis.182 However, Freud’s psychoanalytical model of communication is far more complex than his own extended metaphor suggests. For what was to be connected to the “receiver” was not simply the doctor’s ear, but his “unconscious memory.” Recasting this model of “listening from the outside in” in terms of two answering machines interacting with each other comes closer to Freud’s method.183 But the comparison with the storage technology of answering machines does not quite apply either. What probably influenced Freud’s model of communication most was the method of “attentive self-observation” set out by Gilbert Ballet. Freud extended Ballet’s method; instead of the self-observation of interior speech, he proposed that the therapist lend his ear and memory to the patient. What has been heard will lie dormant in the therapist’s memory, only to rise into recollection once the patient “brings up something new to which it can be related and by which it can be continued.”184 Freud advised his colleagues to eschew even the pencil and notebook during sessions.185 Their memory possessed “a high degree of trustworthiness” even if it was “not absolutely—phonographically—exact.”186

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That lack of phonographical exactitude, said Freud, is a positive virtue. The doctor’s memory does not store material in a linear chronology, but unconsciously associates and filters what was heard. Likewise, the therapist does not simply offer the patients storage capacity, but transfers to them the acoustic element of his own capacity for associating and puzzling out. The task of the analyst is, according to Freud, to take up the  patient’s own internal perspective—to enter the patient’s internal speech. The doctor must think with the word-presentations and verbal residues of the patient, and in so doing give voice to the patient’s unconscious. Sometimes, the therapist will even forget that the internal speech is not his own.

Celebrating or Replacing the Psychotherapist’s Ear As we have seen, Freud propagated a “scientific psychology” early in his career, but even as a medical student in Vienna, he had also attended lectures at the faculty of philosophy, including Franz Brentano’s courses on logic, epistemology, and empiricism. At the invitation of the classicist Theodor Gomperz, Freud translated essays by John Stuart Mill in 1879 and 1880.187 The enormous scope of his interest in philosophy, literature, and theater has led his biographers to call him a veritable “book glutton.”188 This omnivorous curiosity is reflected in Freud’s later definition of psychoanalysis as a much-needed “philosophical auxiliary science” for medicine.189 The term “auxiliary science” came to prominence in nineteenth-century historiography. In the German-speaking world, the Göttingen School of History and the historian Leopold von Ranke became known for advocating the “auxiliary sciences” of history (historische Hilfswissenschaften) as sets of scholarly techniques for evaluating and applying historical sources. These auxiliary disciplines include archaeology, diplomatics, technical chronology, numismatics, and paleography.190 At first glance, such techniques seem to contradict Freud’s understanding of psychoanalysis; far from assisting the search for “historical truth,” psychoanalysis targets the unconscious. But in order to provoke, access, observe, read, or interpret the unconscious, psychoanalysis, too, applies many supplemental bodies of knowledge. Despite its medical foundations, Freud argued in the “Introductory Lectures,” psychoanalysis requires extensive knowledge of human culture, society, sexuality, and the relation between soul and body more generally, all of which have hitherto been considered the domain of poets, philosophers, and mystics.191 Whereas nineteenth-century historians promoted history’s auxiliary sciences as a way of turning history from a seemingly subjective humanistic discipline

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into a proper Wissenschaft, Freud aimed to imbue the science of medicine with more humanistic substance. In this respect, Freud again echoed Gilbert Ballet, who had advocated the reintroduction of history and literary criticism to medicine some years earlier. Freud, however, was seeking a discipline beyond book knowledge. In psychoanalysis, he argued, each case to be treated is different and necessitates meticulous study of the individual patient, not theorems and textbooks alone. Furthermore, psychoanalytical practice—the apparently mere “interchange of words”—cannot be demonstrated or even, because of the special attachment between analyst and patient, be listened to by any other audience. Even for Freud’s most noted cases, it is only through his lectures and, thus, “in the strictest sense of the word, . . . by hearsay that you will get to know psycho-analysis.”192 The process of psychoanalysis must be experienced first-hand; the analyst acquires techniques of listening and interpreting through self-analysis and a lifelong practice.193 Behind Freud’s references to a philosophical auxiliary science lies a strong concept of the therapist: no audiences, but only physicians— thanks to their sensitivity to “hearsay,” detailed knowledge of the individual patient, and long professional experience—are able to make a meaningful diagnosis of what they hear and transmit their knowledge to the next generation. For Freud, then, psychoanalytic techniques are complex knowledge techniques (as defined in chapter 1) informed by the medical study of human thought, the study of literature, and professional experience. This view of psychoanalysis as a philosophical adjunct to medicine and as a “soft” and “subjective” discipline found ardent followers and vehement critics.194 Both sides based their stance on Freud’s advocacy of associative listening. Among the most significant of Freud’s adherents was the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. Not long after Freud founded the Wednesday Psychological Society in Vienna in 1902, giving his approach a first distinct institutional framework, Jung helped the notion of associative listening achieve international prominence. In 1906, he combined Freud’s notion of free association, a method consisting “in the patient simply relating everything, without selection,” with his own diagnostic studies in wordassociation.195 Jung’s experiments confronted patients with long series of “stimulus-words”—head, green, water, prick, angel, long—and asked them to respond spontaneously with one word each. He used the replies, and the reaction time taken for each one, to discover the “pathogenic complex” in question.196 These insights into the patients’ word-images prepared the ground for a more comprehensive talking therapy. The German analyst Karl Abraham, too, backed up Freud’s view of

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psychoanalysis, again emphasizing the therapist’s irreplaceable skill of associative and experience-based listening. In an essay published in 1913, Abraham spoke out even more strongly than Freud against replacing the therapist by objective technologies of writing or audio recording: patients should neither write down their dreams nor record their dream-memories phonographically. It is the task of the therapist alone, wrote Abraham, to hear, rearrange, and interpret the patient’s dream fragments.197 Freud’s youngest student, German American psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, framed a similar argument in 1948 with the concept of the therapist’s “third ear.” The third ear is what enables the therapist to internally recall all of the patient’s verbal articulations, connect them in new ways, and unravel the complexes of associations at the end of a long therapeutic process.198 “One of the peculiarities of this third ear,” explained Reik, “is that it works two ways. It can catch what other people do not say, but only feel and think”—grasping what is said by the by, what is left unsaid, what is said accidentally—“and it can also be turned inward. It can hear voices from within the self that are otherwise not audible because they are drowned out by the noise of our conscious thought-processes.”199 Reik advised the would-be psychoanalyst to “listen to those inner voices with more attention than to what ‘reason’ tells about the unconscious; to be very aware of what is said inside himself, écouter aux voix intérieures, and to shut his ear to the noises of adult wisdom, well-considered opinion, conscious judgment.”200 To a greater extent than Freud, Reik relied on analyzing the patient’s unconscious vocal modulations, “the particular pitch and timbre of his voice, his particular speech rhythm, which we do not consciously observe. There are variations of tone, pauses, and shifted accentuation, so slight that they never reach the limits of conscious observation, individual nuances of pronunciation that we do not notice, but note.”201 Clearly, Reik went further than Freud in giving therapists more practical instructions for the psychoanalytic technique of listening. As for the critics of Freud’s concept of free-floating attention and the various approaches that it inspired, their skepticism focused on the notion of psychoanalysis as a philosophical and highly subjective adjunct to medicine. In place of deliberately associative interpretations, they looked for more transparent and objective methods of treatment. Unsurprisingly, the phonograph, a technology largely neglected by Freud, found much acceptance among his early critics. Particularly for the treatment of psychoses, argued Freud’s detractors, the objective phonographic recording of  therapeutic sessions that he so roundly rejected is in fact indispensable. The first to put phonographic recording into practice with schizo-

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phrenic patients was US psychiatrist Earl F. Zinn. Zinn experimented with a dictation device, probably a Lindström Parlograph, during his studies in Berlin in 1929–31, and once back in New York, began recording his therapy sessions. He used an Edison Dictaphone to record a patient suffering from schizophrenia, first in 1933 at the Worcester State Hospital without the patient’s knowledge, then later with the patient’s permission at the Psychiatric Clinic of the Yale School of Medicine from 1934 to 1935. Transcribing the recordings and other series of interviews, a total of 350 hours’ material, Zinn hoped to attain a new understanding of his patients’ illnesses. At the same time, publishing these “raw data” would give his colleagues more objective insights into psychotherapeutic processes than he would be able to deliver himself out of his “conscious or unconscious bias.” He was convinced that the recorded material itself was “of greater value scientifically than anything I might say about it.”202 This comment was clearly directed at the interpretive sovereignty of the therapist that was asserted so strongly in early psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung, Abraham, and Reik). If Freud had believed it possible to give an inkling of psychoanalysis through lectures in which he foregrounded the patients’ interior viewpoint, Zinn now advocated a direct focus on the patients themselves. Zinn’s demand was consistent with a more general trend starting around 1900 toward “mechanical objectivity,” that is, the use of mechanical technologies of recording and representation to produce apparently more objective knowledge.203 The trend had already begun in the late nineteenth century at the Salpêtrière. Gilbert Ballet resisted it by applying methods such as introspection and literary psychoanalysis, as did Freud, who placed his trust in the subjective, anti-scientistic, and philosophical endeavors of the therapist. In psychotherapy, the demand for more objectivity gathered pace with the emergence of client-centered psychotherapy as proposed by Carl R. Rogers, a psychologist based at Ohio State University and later the University of Chicago. An investigation of Rogers’s work and his role in the antipsychiatry movements of the 1940s to 1960s is beyond the scope of this book,204 but it is worth mentioning that his declared goal was to enhance his patients’ ability to treat themselves. In Rogers’s “non-directive method,” the therapist was to stimulate the patient’s speech by murmuring, nodding, or repeating the patient’s statements verbatim—without necessarily offering a later diagnosis.205 Rogers even suggested using a phonograph during therapy sessions and offering the recording to the patient for self-therapy. With his student Bernard J. Covner, he wrote the earliest systematic reflection on sound recording in psychotherapy. Rogers and Covner described their use of phonography at Ohio State University, where approximately

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one hundred therapeutic interviews were recorded in 1941. The team developed new technologies to facilitate the recordings, including a double turntable phonograph (as single discs could not record more than fourand-a-half minutes) and nondirectional microphones fastened to the patient’s chin to improve recording quality, and designed a foot-pedal operated electric phonograph device for transcribing the interviews.206 In the 1950s, following their lead, dedicated studios were created for recording and playing back psychotherapeutic interviews on tape and LP.207 Freud’s method of knowing from “hearsay” was thus countered by new methods that replaced the psychotherapist’s ear and memory with the seemingly more objective tool of sound recording. One suggestion for a synthesis between Freud’s and his critics’ approaches to the language of the unconscious was formulated in the 1960s in yet another discipline: linguistics. Ruth Hirsch Weir, a linguist working at Stanford University, was interested in the crib talk of infants and produced magnetic tape recordings of the “pre-sleep monologues” of her son Anthony at the age of twenty-eight to thirty months, “alone in his crib, talking to himself.”208 She discovered functions of inner speech at work in the monologues of her son as he fell asleep. In a somewhat eclectic approach, Hirsch Weir blended Freud’s method of psychoanalytic interpretation with linguist Lev Vygotsky’s work on “inner speech.” Vygotsky interpreted inner speech not in terms of associationist psychology, as Ballet and Freud had, but in terms of semiology. His theory of inner language, in turn, was crucial to linguist Roman Jakobson’s thinking on the metalingual and poetic functions of language, which Jakobson regarded as preconditions of human speech. Hirsch Weir analyzed the tape recordings of her son’s crib talk during a summer 1961 research visit with Jakobson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, attesting a capacity for metalingual and poetic language in very young children that Vygotsky and Jakobson had previously only found in older ones.

Thinking with Other People’s Voices In an obituary for Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud praised him as “a ‘visuel’”—a “seer” and precise observer of patients. Charcot would sift through the chaos of symptoms “in his mind’s eye” and order them into a nosological picture.209 Freud, in contrast, was a man of the ear. But when he lent an ear to the many patients who lay down on his couch, Freud listened not only to their unconscious turned inside out but also to his own auditory memories. Resonating in the therapeutic communication were the voices and sounds produced by Freud’s teachers, mentors, and colleagues: Charcot’s

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experiments with hypnosis provoked by the sound of tuning forks, for instance, which offered the French psychopathologist a particularly reliable way of conditioning his patients. Charcot chose to illustrate his model of the sensory and mnemonic associations of memory images with a bell, another acoustic instrument permeated with disciplinary functions in the nineteenth century. Freud disciplined his patients by the use of his own voice but may have had the soft sound of Charcot’s tuning forks in mind. Freud’s fascination with dream images and acoustic hallucinations, along with his notion of the lapsus linguae, shows strong affinities with Charcot’s model of associations and the memory image. In addition, Freud drew inspiration from the methods of the physiologist Gilbert Ballet, who was interested less in psychophysiological automatisms than in the individually variable phenomenon of inner speech. Even so, Ballet initially continued the hypnosis experiments of his mentor Charcot, using light to stimulate each side of the patient’s body separately in order to examine language processing in the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Additionally, Ballet built on numerous existing neuroanatomical studies, the most important of them Paul Broca’s work and the discovery of the auditory cortex by Theodor Meynert, along with the subsequent debates on the localization and functions of processes of auditory cognition for the human faculty of language. For Ballet, auditory images—sound-images and auditory word-images—play a special role in language processing and in both unconscious and conscious abstract thought. He had observed this in his own case, through introspection, and his reading of classical philosophical and medical writings confirmed his theory of thinking with sound. Ballet’s various methods of tracking down the structure and workings of inner language resonated with Freud, who, in his early neurophysiological study On Aphasia, paid special attention to the different speech faculties in the human brain. He was particularly interested in the role that the “associative activity of the acoustic element” plays in this structure.210 In later works, Freud began by setting out a physiology of word-presentations. At this stage, his account of the genesis of word-presentations used inscriptional metaphors such as Bahnung, as Derrida noted, but he subsequently sourced his comparisons from the world of telecommunications. In “The Ego and the Id,” he described the superego as the place where word-presentations take shape, a kind of telephonic switchboard between external auditory perceptions and the “sources in the id.”211 But Freud found the psyche’s clearest expression in his patients’ symptoms—from coughing and stuttering, to musical dream images and acoustic hallucinations, to the slips of the tongue. Words, in contrast, did not come easily. It was to bring the word-presentations of traumatic experiences into spo-

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ken language that Freud created his talking cure: a conversation between patient and analyst, lasting many years, in which the analyst listens for telltale acoustic symptoms and sustains them in his or her memory until they begin to make sense. Ballet had appealed for self-observation to be reintroduced into psychology; Freud translated the internal monologue into therapeutic conversation. In psychoanalysis, the physician takes up the interior perspective on the patient’s behalf, so to speak. On the couch, the patient gives free rein to words; the analyst gathers and interprets them. For Freud, psychoanalysis could not be taught directly—it had to be approached circuitously through the study of cases and the learner’s own professional practice. What is more, wrote Freud, “one learns psycho-analysis on oneself, by studying one’s own personality. This is not quite the same thing as what is called self-observation, but it can, if necessary, be subsumed under it.”212 Once again, Freud echoed Ballet’s call to reconsider the role of self-observation in psychology and psychotherapy. For Freud, “thinking with sound” meant thinking with the voices of others: with the voices of his patients, which he interiorized and analyzed, with the voices speaking from literature, and with the voices of colleagues who had helped to shape his psychoanalytic theory and techniques. Freud’s students, especially Theodor Reik, continued to elaborate his technique of interior, unconscious listening, while detractors of the psychoanalytical method attacked what they considered an unacceptably subjective “science.” In their search for new, more objective methods of psychotherapy, they reached for the pen and the notebook, the gramophone and the tape—the very linear recording systems that Freud had rejected.

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Auditory Images L i ng u i s t ic s a n d M e ta p h y s ic s

In December of 1877, American technician and entrepreneur Thomas Alva Edison filed his patent for a “phonograph or speaking machine,” initially designed as a dictation device.1 It was not long before the capacity for analog recording, storage, and reproduction of sound events had spread virtually worldwide. Cultures of music and speech changed significantly in reaction to the new medium. In that process, media theorist Friedrich Kittler has argued, the phonograph posed harsh competition to traditional writing systems and, even more so, to the human memory and its capacity to preserve sonic impressions.2 Kittler’s contention is based largely on an essay by the French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau, “La mémoire et le phonographe” of 1880. Published soon after Edison’s invention, it draws numerous comparisons between phonography and human memory, but in the end declares the analogy untenable. The phonograph, Guyau explained, is a device for simple playback, whereas the memory is something alive. Memories appear uncontrollably, link together to create things that never existed before, and vanish again. As a result, Guyau called for a different object of comparison to describe the memory, one that underlines the memory’s capacity both to store sensory impressions and to bring them creatively back to life.3 Kittler interprets this turn in Guyau’s argumentation quite simply as the occupational disease of philosophers. Guyau, he writes, favors the merits of human memory over technical recording media only because “no philosopher, not even one who has abandoned philosophy for psychophysics, can rid himself of his professional delusions.”4 For Kittler, the similarities in an analogy between memory and phonography carry more weight than the distinctions that Guyau set out.5 Work such as Guyau’s has prompted historical scholarship to subsume memory research, sound technologies, and sound cultures around 1900 under the label of a “phonographic regime.”6 This definition, in fact,

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reveals more about views of the media at the turn of the twenty-first century than about the period around 1900. In the past decades, advocates of the university subject of media studies—such as Kittler and, before him, Marshall McLuhan—have formulated a strong concept of media that emphasizes the potential of media to shape culture. For McLuhan, the phonograph was a “hot medium” that in its day entirely captured its users’ sense of hearing and gave rise to fresh forms of remembering, knowing, and communicating.7 Taking such thoughts on media further, this chapter addresses less the much-conjured phonographic regime than the theorists who grappled with phonography’s potential at the turn of the twentieth century, giving space to the epistemological concerns that drove their media criticism. In the previous chapter, I mentioned Sigmund Freud’s rejection of the phonograph in psychotherapeutic sessions; he relied on memory, seemingly lacking phonographical exactitude, in order to remember the patient’s utterances in deliberately vague, non-linear, and associative ways. Chapter 3 now turns to two more of Guyau’s and Freud’s contemporaries, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the French philosopher Henri Bergson. They, too, made reference to phonography and compared it to the processes of auditory cognition. But, again like Guyau and Freud, both were interested in the forms and laws of a “thinking with sound” that could not actually be defined through comparisons with a media technology based on inscription and conservation. Alternative explanatory models were required. In pursuit of those models, both Saussure and Bergson, if in different ways, made use of the brain and aphasia research carried out in 1880s Paris (discussed in chapter 2). Saussure’s objective was to expand the theoretical framework on the genesis of “auditory memory images” developed in Paris by looking at processes of collective memory and communication. To grasp these processes, he called for a new theory and a new research praxis in linguistics—to be based in part, though not exclusively, on the methods of the natural sciences. Bergson strove to understand “auditory images” in their temporal duration, which amounted to a patent critique of positivist brain research and its focus on the material here and now. The theories of auditory thinking presented by Saussure and Bergson were thus simultaneously theories of science, aspiring to relocate their respective disciplines within the field of tension between the sciences humaines and the sciences exactes.

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The Linguist’s Ear Between 1907 and 1911, Ferdinand de Saussure taught his famous “Cours de linguistique générale” at the University of Geneva. In these lectures, he commented on recent developments in linguistics, including the growing role of language recordings. He referred to the Phonogram Archive in Vienna, founded in 1899 by the physiologist Sigmund Exner, and to the Archives de la parole in Paris, initiated in 1911 by the linguist Ferdinand Brunot. I will return to these institutions in more detail in this and the next chapter, showing how both used phonographic technology still new at the time as a means of systematically collecting, analyzing, and conserving languages and music from all over the world. What is worth noting here is Saussure’s regret that these documentary endeavors had begun only so recently, with the result that many older languages and dialects were lost to linguistics forever: “In order to have direct evidence available, it would have been necessary to have compiled throughout history collections of the kind currently being compiled in Vienna and in Paris, comprising recordings of spoken samples of all languages.”8 Saussure’s enthusiasm for phonographic recordings sprang from his belief that they could offset the “prestige of writing.”9 Whereas linguistics had hitherto concentrated mainly on textual documents, Saussure considered the spoken word to be the real research object of his discipline. Compared to the spoken word, writing is just an auxiliary medium, and to be treated with caution. The written form veils the sounding quality of language, he remarked—it is “not a garment, but a disguise.”10 For a linguist to put his trust in the written form of a language alone is tantamount to believing “that in order to find out what a person looks like it is better to study his photograph than his face.”11 Saussure nevertheless pointed out that phonogram archives cannot dispense with complementary studies by linguists. Even if, as was usual in Brunot’s Archives de la parole, a systematic approach is taken, collecting pronunciation samples of different languages and dialects based on canonical texts, explanations are still required “when it comes to publishing the texts thus recorded.”12 This note qualifies Saussure’s praise for the phonograph somewhat. But why exactly is it necessary to supplement the sound recordings with additional explanations—what is the nature of the knowledge that linguists are to contribute in this way? The answer to that question takes us back to Saussure’s early works—to a period his biographers are only now beginning to explore. The Cours de linguistique générale, dating from late in his life, is today seen as his

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key work, yet Saussure himself did not even plan to publish the Geneva lectures. They were edited posthumously by his students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye; only later did it emerge that Bally and Sechehaye had not attended the lectures personally, but had compiled the book out of notes taken by various students and even formulated crucial passages themselves. Starting in the 1950s, critical editions began to appear,13 and linguists entered prolonged debate over the “authentic” Ferdinand de Saussure.14 Some even went as far as to claim that the publication of the Cours had made Saussure the father of structuralism against his own intentions. In their account, the reading of Saussure that continues to prevail today is nothing but an “invention by the long-dominant structuralist paradigm, which itself determined the edition and reception of the Cours to a large degree.”15 More recent scholarship thus rereads not only the additional lecture transcripts that have been successively discovered, but also the unpublished notebooks from Saussure’s earlier period, and attempts to reconstruct in detail what was not always a perfectly rigorous process of theory formation. In light of Saussure’s early writings, the observations he made (as far as we know) in the Cours regarding the linguistic value of phonography gain sharper contours. Particularly interesting in this respect are documents from Saussure’s student days in Leipzig and his subsequent research and teaching activities in 1880s Paris—where he began his quest for a linguistics that would attend to language above and beyond its capacity to be fixed in written or phonographic form. As we will see, Saussure was responding to language research in the physiology and psychology of his era. Against this background, I then return to Saussure’s later work in Geneva and his proposal, presented in the Cours, for a new linguistics: a science du langage that, as such, would demand a new synthesis of approaches from the humanities and the natural sciences.

Linguistics as Science or Humanities Saussure’s interest in determining the position of linguistics between science and the humanities evolved in his early work and may be partially explained by his biography. Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure came from a family of Genevan aristocrats who had held a special affinity with the natural sciences for generations—his great-grandfather was the physicist, meteorologist, and geologist Horace-Bénédicte de Saussure; his great-uncle the chemist Nicolas Théodore de Saussure; and his father the entomologist and mineralogist Henri de Saussure. The family was well connected

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in scientific circles and maintained close relations with the Humboldts and Charles Darwin, among others.16 Ferdinand de Saussure, however, continued the family scientific tradition only briefly and reluctantly. In Geneva, he spent what he later called a “needlessly wasted year” studying physics and chemistry.17 After failing his exams, in 1876 he began studying Indo-European linguistics at the University of Leipzig, at the time a leading institution in historical comparative linguistics and the stronghold of the Junggrammatiker, or neogrammarians.18 In Leipzig, Saussure did not belong to the circle of pub-going kneipisants,19 devotees of the Leipzig School of neogrammarians and especially its professors August Leskien, Karl Brugman, and Hermann Osthoff. But all his life, Saussure shared with the neogrammarians a question that probably occupied him not least because of his family background: “Might there perhaps be in languages laws as understood in the physical and natural sciences? In other words, relations which hold in all cases and for ever?”20 Saussure did not take this question lightly. At the end of his deliberations, we find a complicated Yes and No. Whereas the neogrammarians postulated “laws effective without exception” for the sound shifts of languages across history and tried to prove their existence using the evidence of science,21 Saussure found the neogrammarians’ inductive concentration on individual language phenomena misguided. He was more interested in a general definition of the object of study. What actually is language? According to what laws does it operate? And can these laws, as Saussure put it, be ascertained from a “panchronic point of view”?22 Initial reflections on these questions are already present in Saussure’s early Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indoeuropéennes (1879), written when he was only twenty-one. In this study of the Proto-Indo-European vowel system, Saussure distinguished between different “phonemic units,”23 each composed of one of four possible “root vowels” that appear either on their own, in combination, or accompanied by “sonant coefficients” (later called laryngeals).24 The young linguist’s attempt to reconstruct a historical spoken language “from which the languages of the Orient and Occident proceeded” reveals his long-standing interest in word sounds and their acoustic values within linguistic systems.25 Methodologically, Saussure suggested that the study of individual sounds as commonly practiced in linguistics should be broadened to include their morphological surroundings, making it possible to consider the linguistic values of a language as a whole for a particular period of time and in a historically comparative perspective. This proposal anticipates parts of Saussure’s later research agenda—a point to which I return below.

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During his studies, Saussure spent a guest semester at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin in 1878–79. There, he met American William Dwight Whitney, a philosopher of language and Sanskrit scholar whose study The Life and Growth of Language (1875) would have a lasting impact on Saussure’s view of language as a sign-based, historically evolved, and dynamic medium of communication. Equally influential to Saussure was Whitney’s call for a linguistics focused on the general rules and functions of language.26 While in Berlin, Saussure may also have attended Carl Wernicke’s lectures on cerebral anatomy as an introduction to the study of speech disorders and Heymann Steinthal’s course “Philosophy of Language and General Grammar.”27 If so, they gave him a direct glimpse into the “Berlin language controversy,” in which Wernicke and Steinthal were embroiled at the time and which, once again, revolved around the demarcation of areas of competence between the sciences and the humanities.28 The dispute was precipitated by the Berlin physician Eduard Hitzig’s argument that the development of language is not a matter solely for the sense of hearing and the auditory cortex, as the neuroanatomist Theodor Meynert had initially claimed (see chapter 2). Hitzig believed that the motor function is equally essential and localized mainly in the precentral gyrus in immediate proximity to the frontal lobe, which in Hitzig’s view was the organ of independent language processing.29 Meynert’s student Carl Wernicke took up Hitzig’s conjecture in Der aphasische Symptomencomplex (The aphasia symptom complex) of 1874, in which he located no fewer than four language centers in the human brain (see chapter 2). These attempts to localize language faculty in the brain immediately drew criticism from the linguist Steinthal, who accused the neuroanatomists of methodological imprecision. Neuroanatomical localization must, he objected, be preceded by an exact psycholinguistic definition of language: “If one wishes to localize, then one must first know precisely what is to be localized, what elements are involved.”30 In the course of his own observations of various language disorders, Steinthal had already identified three factors crucial to the faculty of speech: the organic mechanisms that enable the motor articulation of sounds, the psychological mechanisms of language processing and production, and the capacity to imagine and mentally represent speech contents.31 But, the linguist worried, “how should we think about this matter when localizing parts of the brain? Does each of these three aspects of language reside in one center? Or is just one aspect present?”32 Steinthal’s appeal for a more precise definition of language, inspired by brain research but modeled on concerns in linguistics, would soon be answered by Saussure.

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Living Languages In November 1880, Saussure arrived in Paris. Aged twenty-three, he had successfully completed his doctorate in Leipzig and undertaken a first research expedition to Lithuania. Based on his field research, Saussure regarded the contemporary Lithuanian language as a “linguistic state” (état de langue) that permitted inferences to be drawn about past linguistic states, and especially about words in Sanskrit.33 This interest in the value of living languages as sources continued to occupy Saussure during his ten-year stay in France. After moving to Paris, Saussure drew important impulses from the courses offered by the classicist Louis Havet and the comparative linguist Michel Bréal at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE).34 Early on, Bréal criticized the writing-oriented approaches of comparative linguistics as initiated in Germany by Franz Bopp and further cultivated by the neogrammarians.35 We may presume that Bréal’s call for a linguistics based on the spoken word was reflected in his EPHE seminar on grammaire comparée, which he soon passed on to Saussure once the latter had been appointed associate professor at the EPHE.36 Certainly, Saussure witnessed the collaboration that had been flourishing since the late 1870s between Havet, Bréal, physiologist ÉtienneJules Marey, and two experts on the languages of the deaf, Léon Vaïsse and Charles Rosapelly. These five scholars aimed to reform linguistics entirely and establish it as an experimental discipline. To that end, they set up laboratories in Paris, equipped with resonators, tuning forks, and the full arsenal of measuring and inscription devices available at the time.37 Marey, based at the Collège de France, had already been using his “graphic method” to carry out chronographic studies on motion phenomena as varied as bird flight, heart rhythms, and the vibrations of violin strings,38 but the group now concentrated increasingly on the study of articulatory movements during speech. Some of their studies were based on the phonautograph invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1857,39 and others on the phonograph after Edison presented his apparatus at the American Pavilion in the Paris World’s Fair of 1878.40 In addition, Rosapelly and Marey constructed graphic devices to inscribe speech movements in the chest, pharynx, mouth, and nasal cavity. Fascinated by the visualization of sound production that had now become possible, the group liked to speak of an “acoustics of the eyes.”41 With the help of innovative laboratory technologies, the Paris group identified the “phoneme” as a way of examining the smallest possible material unit of language in this fresh context.42 Havet first made a study

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of the pratishakhyas—the oldest manuals on the pronunciation of Vedic hymns—that attracted much attention among Sanskrit scholars.43 Alongside the reconstruction of historical spoken sounds, however, a new interest soon arose in the sounds of living languages and dialects. In short, philology’s time-honored focus on linguistic forms was now supplemented by a new physiological and physical view of language. This shift in focus was advanced by the work of l’abbé Pierre-Jean Rousselot, a student of Bréal, Rosapelly, and Marey who directed the experimental phonetics lab at the Collège de France in 1897. Rousselot had already spent time studying “living speech,” le parler vivant,44 and especially the local dialect of his hometown, Cellefrouin, in southwestern France. Rousselot, too, constructed new precision instruments for the graphic inscription of organic sound production. For studies in the Pyrenees, for example, a “language inscriptor” was used to record sonic vibrations and the movements of nose, lips, larynx, and tongue, adjusting to the local population’s high-frequency pronunciation of the “closed a” (see chapter 5).45 In turn, Rousselot’s work inspired the philologist Ferdinand Brunot to found the Archives de la parole—the institution to which Saussure would refer shortly afterward in his Cours—at the Sorbonne in 1911. Speaking at the opening of the archives (figure 3.1), Brunot set out a catalogue of objectives that was anything but modest. Indeed, he aimed to start a collection of all the world’s languages, to create a “linguistic atlas” of every French dialect and patois, and to buttress French as the national language through phonographic teaching media.46 Brunot wanted to give the reading linguist the assistance of a phonetically trained listener, but he also wanted to make his mark on living languages themselves. Saussure studied and taught contemporaneously with Havet, Bréal, Vaïsse, Rosapelly, Marey, Rousselot, and Brunot in France. At the time, talk of phonography was ubiquitous in academic circles. Yet Saussure’s notes from Paris do not mention Bréal and Havet’s working group of experimental phoneticians and linguists, for whom the phonograph quickly became a pivotal research medium. The reason may lie in a methodological difference of opinion. Saussure’s Parisian colleagues were endeavoring to contemplate living languages from the outside—as natural phenomena that could and should be precisely measured, then captured in apparently objective speech recordings. Though Saussure continued to seek intersections with the findings of his Paris colleagues, especially as regards their notion of the phoneme as the smallest unit of language, his work followed a new track. Concerning living languages, he brought to Paris the experience of his field research, based on very different methods: comprehensive surveys in the Lithuanian-speaking region and participant observation. His aspiration was

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Figure 3.1: Opening of the Archives de la parole in 1911. The Minister of Culture speaks directly into the funnel of the phonograph while the founder of the archive, Ferdinand Brunot, waits behind him to give his “Discours d’inauguration.” Photograph from Ferdinand Brunot, Inauguration des Archives de la parole: 3 juin 1911, sous la présidence de M. Th. Steeg (Paris: Imprimerie Albert Manier, 1911). Bibliothèque National de France, gallica.bnf.fr.

less to archive a living language than to approach that language as itself a living archive from which the remnants of languages of different epochs and their evolutions could be retrieved. In the 1880s, Saussure started to combine his early work with the approaches of his linguist colleagues in Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris in order to trace how living languages not only evolve over time but also take on a dynamic structure in and through the minds of language communities. Key to Saussure’s emerging theory of language as a living entity was a concept taken from psychology: the auditory image.

Phonetic Circuits and Acoustic Oppositions Saussure’s first reflections on the auditory image arose in response to his reading of La parole intérieure (1881) by psychologist Victor Egger.47 A

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page of handwritten notes on the first twenty-six pages of Egger’s study are now held in the Archives Ferdinand de Saussure, Geneva. In these notes, Saussure commented page by page on the book, which begins with a discussion of the topoi of “inner language” and “inner speech” in the history of European philosophy—from Plato and Aristotle through Quintilian, Pliny the Younger, Locke, Leibniz, Rivarol, and Condillac and up to Louis de Bonald and Séverin de Cardaillac.48 In Egger’s brief account, the question that absorbed this long list of authors was whether language or the world of ideas came first. Did physical language shape ideas, or did, conversely, the metaphysical world of ideas shape language? Egger took the question in a psychological direction, arguing for a view of interior speech as a “psychic fact” (fait psychique) that mediates between exterior speech and the world of ideas.49 According to Egger, interior speech is a distant, approximate echo of exterior speech, assembled out of many different auditory impressions.50 Unlike in outward speech, it does not matter in inward speech if our statements are over-simplified or too abbreviated, for “it is enough if we are understood by ourselves.”51 Interior speech is our involuntary companion, which sometimes becomes conscious when we are reading, reflecting, or drawing breath. Often, it alerts us to unexpected expressions of will, guides and enables thought processes, and prepares exterior speech.52 Egger’s study would soon serve as a source for the work of physiologist Gilbert Ballet in Le langage intérieur (1888) (see chapter 2).53 Whereas Egger concentrated on the psychical function of interior speaking (parole intérieure), Ballet was most interested in the neurological formation, constant development, and possible dysfunction of an interior language (langage intérieur). He described inner concepts not as auditory phenomena alone, but as associations of acoustic, visual, and motor word-images. Like Egger, Ballet stressed the unconscious function of interior speech and its lack of central control in both the healthy and the ill.54 We do not know whether Egger, Ballet, and Saussure were personally acquainted,55 but Egger’s and Ballet’s studies were widely read in the French- and German-speaking academic world of the late nineteenth century—the philosopher Elme-Marie Caro, whose lectures Saussure attended in the first year of his stay in Paris, wrote a review of Egger’s book, for example.56 We can assume that Saussure participated personally in the contemporary discourse around interior language and interior speech. Saussure’s notes on Egger’s book (figure 3.2) are initially skeptical. They accuse the psychologist of “imprecise observation” and an “insufficient distinction” between the transition from idea to word and from word to idea.57 For Saussure, it is not inner language, but the idea that has primacy.

Figure 3.2: Saussure’s notes on Victor Egger’s La parole intérieure, taken during his early stay in Paris in 1881. Held at Bibliothèque de Genève, Arch. de Saussure, 374/1, f. 99.

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Interior speech is not even absolutely necessary for thinking, he argued; only in a second step are ideas translated into interior language, and thence into spoken language or written language. An interior language is required if one is to express oneself linguistically with clarity.58 To support this hypothesis, Saussure too turned to the history of philosophy, echoing Louis de Bonald’s famous maxim that man thinks his word and “hears it mentally” before he speaks his thought. “I would say,” wrote Saussure in his notes, “that man thinks his word [internally] before he speaks it.”59 In fact, this is exactly what Egger claimed, and so it is not surprising that Saussure’s judgment became more and more positive as he progressed through the book. What particularly impressed Saussure about La parole intérieure was Egger’s distinction between the auditory impression and the “vocal image” (image vocale).60 The vocal image of a word, according to Egger, is acquired through experience, but the first auditory impression, and thus also the individual vocalization, is forgotten as soon as the word is heard from many different lips and its auditory image becomes associated with other mental images. What remains is an abstract vocal image, which serves as a “working instrument, a tool of intelligence.”61 It is by means of this vocal image that speakers can articulate their sentences and give their ideas linguistic form. Saussure underlined these points of Egger’s in his notebook, adding the reminder: “Reread this.”62 Egger’s concept of the vocal image would leave a lasting mark on Saussure’s view of human language. Very soon after reading La parole intérieure, Saussure used the terms “auditory image” (image auditive) and “acoustic image” or “sound-image” (image acoustique) in the study Phonétique, written between 1881 and 1884 but published only posthumously. In Phonétique, Saussure visualized the relationship between idea, auditory image, and auditory perception as a “circuit” (figure 3.3).63 Similar sketches recur in his later notes, always serving to test out linguistic hypotheses. I will return to these testimonies to “graphic thinking”64 because they may be interpreted partly as a response to the numerous diagrams produced by aphasia researchers in the period. First, though, let us note that Saussure’s early sketch of the acoustic-psychological cycle once more aligns with Egger’s views. Like Egger (and later Ballet), Saussure refuted the existence of a centre d’idéation—an independent bastion of thought that links together all the sensory impressions, as featured in Charcot’s bell diagram (see figure 2.4).65 For Saussure, the auditory image is essential and insuperable; it influences speakers’ thinking without their intention, circumvents their will, and can be controlled and directed by them only to a limited extent.

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Figure 3.3: Sketch from Saussure’s posthumously published Phonétique (written in Paris between 1881 and 1884). According to Saussure, the auditory image is to a certain extent a memory image, generated out of auditory perception; at the same time, auditory images themselves affect the formation of ideas (inner semicircular line). Once this process is established, the direction can also be reversed (outer semicircular line)—the auditory image determines the perception, steering and directing it as new auditory perceptions are calibrated against images of things already heard. The auditory image thus acts as a tool to translate and simultaneously mold ideas into spoken language. Ferdinand de Saussure, Phonétique, f. 59v. MS Fr 266 Box 1:8, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Later in Phonétique, Saussure returned to this unconscious dimension, postulating that the auditory image may take on the role of a “directive image” (image directrice) and play a structural part in determining the linguistic articulation of an idea.66 Here, the auditory image instigates both the phonetic and the muscular production of a phoneme because, paradoxically, an “intentional movement [i.e., speech], that is, one induced by a part of the image, may bring about an acoustic element that is not intentional.”67 This formulation probably also refers back to the language

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controversy between Hitzig and Steinthal in Berlin, mentioned above, and Steinthal’s attempts to include auditory and motor imagery within a profoundly linguistic theory. Saussure regarded auditory and motor images as a psychical counterpart to the material unit of the phoneme. Or, rather, he saw these sensory images as a necessary condition for the linguistic unit of the phoneme to take shape. Like the phoneme, wrote Saussure, auditory images are antecedents to the speaker’s intention; they influence the sounding quality and meaning of effective speech and thereby influence thought itself.68 And like the phoneme, the auditory image has both a concrete, acoustic function and an abstract one. Within a particular speech chain, it constitutes a time-independent, indivisible linguistic unit, the “totality of the sound perceived at one moment.” In the system of language, it is an abstract, atemporal unit—a type—that differs from other units through “acoustic oppositions” (in other words, that marks distinctions). Saussure formulated the point, so crucial to his later theory of language, in this way: “Language is composed of a system of acoustic oppositions.”69 These oppositions are the differences between easily distinguishable sounds and sound-images, as well as between those that differ only in the temporal prolongation of [a] to [a:], in the distinction between unvoiced [p] and voiced [b], or in the placing of a tiny pause.70 As a rule, such acoustic distinctions are defining for the “semiological value” of a word (with the exception of polysemic items).71 It was these small yet momentous differences—indeed, “les différences seules”—to which Saussure planned to devote his attention in future.72 In his Paris notes, Saussure had thus already outlined the research agenda of a “semiological phonetics” that would identify sounds, sequences of sounds, and the value of sounds “for ideas (the acousticpsychological cycle).”73 Drawing on his field research in Lithuania and the experimental linguistics that emerged in 1880s Paris, he concentrated on processes of speaking and the smallest units of living languages. In contrast to his Paris colleagues, however, he did not approach the sound of language only from the outside, as a given and a natural phenomenon capable of being registered and scrutinized with the help of new recording technologies. Instead, building on the Berlin language controversy around Wernicke, Hitzig, and Steinthal and the study on interior speech by the Parisian psychologist Victor Egger, Saussure took up the challenge of finding a new psycholinguistic definition of the elements of language. In this redefinition, a leading role falls to the “auditory image” as an unconsciously operating, differentiating unit. It enables not only linguistic articulation, but also the structures of language as such. This structural

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nature of language was what Saussure tried to define, following the lead of William Dwight Whitney.

Hearing and Seeing At least in principle, a language can manage without visual representations. This was Saussure’s conclusion in the period after 1891, when he returned to the city of his birth, Geneva, disappointed at not having received a coveted professorship in Paris.74 In Geneva, he was first appointed professor extraordinarius for the comparative history of Indo-European languages; five years later came a full professorship in Sanskrit and IndoEuropean languages. Saussure was only partially satisfied with this post, however. Despite his circle of gifted students, he lamented the generally low standard of Genevan students and the poverty of the academic environment in linguistics.75 A scholarly dialogue that proved significant for Saussure’s theory of language nevertheless arose with Théodore Flournoy, an acquaintance from Saussure’s student days and, later, a professor of psychophysiology in Geneva.76 At the time, Flournoy was working on what he called “synopsia,” a form of synesthesia in which colors are heard. He was guided by the hypothesis that sense-related cognitive processes rarely take place in isolation, and that auditory representations are frequently connected with visual, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, muscular, thermal, and other impressions.77 Physiologists attributed this phenomenon to neural connections between the brain centers (see chapter 2). Flournoy, who had studied with Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, additionally pointed out that because the human body is constantly in motion, the entire muscular system just as constantly exerts its own unconscious influence on “affective associations,”78 eliciting heterogeneous sensations such as the hearing of colors. Flournoy created a diagram to show that auditory thinking is always accompanied by contractions of the blood vessels, the intestines, and in fact all muscular movements of the body (figure 3.4). In general, Flournoy regarded such affective associations as “natural” or innate. He described them as being independent of “habitual associations” (the connections between mental representations that are conditioned by culture, education, and upbringing). In contrast, phenomena such as word-images, in Flournoy’s view, are the outcome of both habitual and affective associations between sound-images, orthographic images, motor images, and color images.79 To substantiate this, in Des phénomènes de synopsie (1893) Flournoy discussed a questionnaire to identify individual ideas of color and form for vowels, consonants, diphthongs, particular

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Figure 3.4: Flournoy’s 1893 diagram shows how auditory perceptions (sons) are processed by the auditory center (centre auditif) and the center for the innervation of the internal organs (centre d’innervation des organs); the overall center of internal sensations (centre des sensations internes) connects both centers with the visual center (centre visuel) and with the sensations of the internal organs and muscular system (centre d’innervation des organs, système musculaire). Théodore Flournoy, Des phénomènes de synopsie (audition colorée): photismes, schèmes visuels, personnifications (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1893), 22.

words, and so on.80 One of the test subjects was an “eminent linguist, Monsieur X”—Ferdinand de Saussure.81 “M. X” did not restrict himself to supplying exhaustive answers to the questions, also challenging several of the study’s fundamental assumptions.82 Contrary to what the questionnaire implied, he argued, it is not the sound but the specific written form of a phoneme—for example, the phonemes in “terrain, plein, matin, chien,”

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which are homophonous in French—that evokes the different color images. Saussure’s self-observation reads poetically: When that vowel is written ain, I see it pale yellow like a half-fired brick; when it is written ein, I think of a network of purplish-blue veins; when it is written in, I no longer know at all what color sensation it evokes in my mind, and am disposed to believe that it evokes none at all; finally, when it is written en (which only occurs after a preceding i), the ensemble ien rather recalls a tangle of hemp rope, still fresh, which has not yet taken on the whitish tint of well-worn rope.83

From these observations, Flournoy and Saussure derived theories that could hardly have been more different. In Flournoy’s view, Saussure had confirmed his basic premise that the complex associations between a phoneme’s written, acoustic, and color images affect language use in regular, if individually distinctive, ways. Consequently, the general theory of language should pay more attention than before to “alphabetical photisms.”84 Saussure, in contrast, interpreted his self-observation as negating the usefulness of linguistic theory studying varying color ideas like the ones he found induced by the written forms of the vowel a in craque [kʁak] and roi [ʁwa]. For if impressions of color arise from orthographic distinctions alone, the “acoustic values” of the word-images remain entirely untouched, as does the function of language founded on “acoustic images.”85 Saussure thus proposed a theory of language that clearly distinguished acoustic values from textual and visual values, yet without distinguishing between spoken and written languages in terms of their prestige. This is remarkable not least because the philosopher Jacques Derrida would later build upon Saussure’s thinking with a very different accent. Starting from distinctions that exist solely in the written form, such as the vowel a in différence, pronounced [difeʁɑ̃s], and the neologism différance, also pronounced [difeʁɑ̃s], Derrida constructed a theory of signs that accords clear primacy to writing.86 The differences between the linguistic theories of Flournoy, Saussure, and Derrida become all the more striking when we consider the significance attached in Saussure’s later work to the “spoken word,” “the community of speakers,” and the “sound system” more generally.87

“Thought-Sound” In the Cours de linguistique générale, Saussure once again made the sounding image—now interchangeably named image acoustique and image verbale—

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the central object of his theory of language. He described it as the psychical component of the linguistic concept. Out of the intertwining of soundimage and concept emerges the linguistic sign (signe).88 More precisely, the concept determines the signified (signifié), while the sound-image fulfills the function of the signifier (signifiant). In this way, language, based on signs, mediates between two unorganized levels, that of “vague, amorphous thought” and that of the mass of sounds.89 Language takes the place between the physical and the psychological realm.90 According to Saussure, what happens in that process “is neither a transformation of thoughts into matter, nor a transformation of sounds into ideas.” Rather, it is “a somewhat mysterious process by which ‘thought-sound’ evolves divisions, and a language takes shape.”91 Sound-images, then, are derived from the spoken language, become abstract, and enable the rearticulation of a phoneme or word. They are abstract in a similar way to the notes of a melody, which on every realization take on a different sound in a particular, perhaps ill-tuned, instrument.92 In the Cours, Saussure described the formation of soundimages not simply as an effect of the spoken language, but also as its precondition. They are tools of listening, memorizing, thinking, and speaking. Yet human beings do not necessarily think in sound-images. Saussure stressed this point again and again in his Geneva lectures, citing the work of the neuroanatomists and aphasia researchers that he had followed closely during his time in Berlin and Paris. Starting in the early studies by Paul Broca, these lines of research had ascribed the possibility of different language systems (spoken, gestural, written, pictorial) to the existence of corresponding brain centers (auditory, motor, visual).93 Associations between these centers bring about the formation of complex concepts. In the case of brain injury, disease, or disability, the centers can also function independently of one another to a certain extent, at least if the patient still retains the ability “to produce in any given mode signs corresponding to normal language.”94 Saussure inferred from this that linguistic concepts give rise to different sign systems depending on whether they are associated with acoustic, motor, or visual mental images. Quite in line with his earlier debate with Théodore Flournoy on “alphabetical photisms,” if necessary: he thus arrived at a theory of language that clearly distinguishes acoustic values from visual and motor values. By implication, spoken language can function independently of other sign systems. It derives its body of rules from the differentiating character of sound-images and is grounded essentially “upon psychological contrasts between these auditory impressions.”95 For Saussure, however, thinking in and by means of differentiating mental images is not an individual process, but a collective one. How the sound-image constitutes itself in the “speech circuit” and works to gener-

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ate rules is shown in two diagrams, inserted by the editors of the Cours, which underscore the explanatory power of Saussure’s sketches (figures 3.5a and b).96 The circuit outlined here is based on a sender-receiver model: a speaker associates a particular concept with a sound-image; they articulate said sound-image; the listener perceives it through the sense of hearing, identifies it with a particular sound-image, and associates this sound-image with the concept. As soon as the listener takes their turn to speak, the cycle resumes. The accumulated tracks of memory—the “stock of imprints” built up out of the communicative circuits of a linguistic community—are therefore a “social product.”97

Figures 3.5a and 3.5b: These two images by the editors of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) illustrate how the sound-image (image acoustique) constitutes itself and gradually changes through an ongoing circle of communication that involves not only two speakers and listeners, but the entire web of audition and phonation of a linguistic community. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, 3rd ed. (Paris: Payot, 1931), 27 and 28. Bibliothèque National de France, gallica.bnf.fr.

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Saussure drew far-reaching conclusions from this social context for the discipline of linguistics. The study of languages, he advised, must take as its object whole linguistic communities, not individual speakers. “If we could collect the totality of word patterns [images verbales] stored in all those individuals,” Saussure wrote in the Cours, “we should have the social bond which constitutes their language. It is a fund accumulated by the members of the community through the practice of speech, a grammatical system existing potentially in every brain, or more exactly in the brains of a group of individuals; for the language is never complete in any single individual but exists perfectly only in the collectivity.”98 Once again, the parallels between Saussure’s concept of the soundimage or image verbale and Victor Egger’s of the auditory image are clear. Egger, too, emphasized the social dimension of language and the influence of other speakers on the evolution of a speaker’s auditory images. Certainly, Egger’s analysis focuses on individual, interior speech, whereas Saussure formulated a linguistic concern relating to the whole treasury of mental images shared by a linguistic community, the “associations, ratified by collective agreement, which go to make up the language” in its entirety.99 Saussure was now faced with the difficulty of capturing “the totality of word patterns,” distributed across the minds of a whole linguistic community and in constant flux within the acoustic communication circuit.100 The special thrust of Saussure’s theory of language, then, is to expand the remit of linguistics.

Positioning Linguistics “A linguist who is only a linguist will not I believe even manage to classify the facts correctly,” stated Saussure, advocating for an approach that takes its inspiration from various different disciplines at once.101 This positioning of linguistics as a multidisciplinary endeavor resulted from Saussure’s conviction that most his fellow linguists “never took very great care to define exactly what it was they were studying.”102 To identify its research object more precisely, linguistics must put languages under the microscope and dissect them like plants: “The longitudinal section shows us the fibres themselves which make up the plant, while the transversal section shows us their arrangement on one particular level.”103 In order to capture the dynamic “semiological life” of a language,104 what was required was a longitudinal section, in the sense of a study of language in its evolutionary historicity or diachronicity. In that process, Saussure warned, a language could seldom simply be tracked backward

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in history, as in the case of French and its descent from Latin; in general, every language has diverse historical origins.105 This point expands the object of linguistic study ad infinitum, as there is no primal language or prototype, only linguistic states always already marked by the traces of earlier linguistic states. In this sense, linguists are similar to geologists and astronomers, who are acutely aware that their objects of research are the provisional products of enormously long periods of time.106 Unlike the geologist and the astronomer, though, the linguist joins the historian of law or of economics in studying human sign systems—to be exact, “simply the most important of such systems.”107 The transverse section, in contrast, makes it possible for linguistics to consider languages in their historical or present-day “synchronic states.” Somewhat like mathematicians, linguists derive from the acoustic material of a particular point in time—a year, a generation, a century—the rule-based relationships between sounds, groups of sounds, and whole systems of sounds. “To account for what happens in these combinations,” a science is needed that “treats combinations rather like algebraic equations. A binary group will imply a certain number of articulatory and auditory features imposing conditions upon each other, in such a way that when one of them varies there will be a necessary alteration of the others which can be calculated.”108 In this process, the linguist should identify linguistic distinctions on the syntagmatic level (each actual, linear, spoken sequence—parole) and on the associative level (the relationship of the spoken word to the virtual lexicon—langue). Negligible historical modifications within a state of language should be ignored, just as mathematicians ignore infinitesimal quantities in operations such as the calculation of logarithms.109 Ultimately, however, Saussure did not see languages as stable research objects that can be abstractly described in the way geologists can describe rock cycles or mathematicians can describe numbers and formulas. It is important, too, not to see languages as “belonging to a province of their own, a fourth realm of nature,” or as growing like a plant, an “organism developing of its own accord.”110 Otherwise, the vital point that a linguistic state results from the collective mind of a linguistic community and from change over the course of time will be overlooked.111 Alongside “external linguistics,” which examines the emergence, transformation, sound, and form of language much like an object of research in the natural sciences, Saussure described “internal linguistics,” which concerns itself with the laws and internal coherence of a language, and to this end addresses the virtual system of language available to members of the linguistic collective.

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For internal linguistics as well, linguistic sign systems are not pure abstractions, but are of a psychic human nature and always tied to psychological realities “localised in the brain.”112 Aspiring to inventory the accumulation of acoustic images that are shaped by linguistic evolution and bridge the virtual space between the minds of a linguistic community, the son of a family closely associated with botany, mineralogy, and geology thus proposed a linguistics inspired by the natural sciences, but ultimately positioned within the humanities (or rather sciences humaines, which for Saussure included the life sciences). In terms of the theory of science, Saussure laid claim to having founded a general semiology that would, in the future, be relevant to numerous different domains of knowledge. The task of such a semiology, he wrote, is to define languages as precisely as possible—but not absolutely precisely, for languages are social phenomena, and as such are subject to the constant play of mutability.113

Inventories, Explanatory Texts, Drawings In terms of his methods, Saussure fit the part of a classic man of letters, spending most of his time at his desk at home. It seems that he did not, or only for the rarest of visits, set foot in the experimental laboratories of the new linguistics that arose while he was staying in Paris. Nor did he pursue field research to any extent, apart from the studies in Lithuania that shaped his view of living languages early on. In order to investigate a language, Saussure remarked pointedly in the Cours, a person must be able to speak it, to enter into the language, to be a member of the language users’ community.114 Even then, languages are neither invented by their speakers nor ever mastered and understood in their entirety but are received as passed down through generations and epochs. As a result, the laws of language cannot be studied by means of introspection—the method that Egger, among others, had proposed to study interior speech. Instead, Saussure developed another method to immerse himself in linguistic communities, as becomes evident in his notebooks. Many of the notebooks that Saussure left behind are adorned with richly imaginative drawings of the speakers of various languages. Saussure mostly drew heads, imagining the speakers’ coiffures, beard styles, clothing, and facial profiles, a choice which may again reflect his preference for auditory components of language over gestures. On the upper part of one page of the Paris notes (figure 3.6), he sketched such a community of speakers; in the lower part, he illustrated the need for the linguist to participate in the communities of living languages in order to identify the

Figure 3.6: Page of Saussure’s Paris notes from the 1880s, with drawings illustrating the linguist’s need to participate (at least virtually) in the communities of living languages. Held at Bibliothèque de Genève, Arch. de Saussure, 374/1, f. 358.

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metastructure of the language. Here, Saussure portrayed the linguist as a two-headed figure who stands behind the speaker, listening and observing the language. The drawing is annotated: “The linguist analyzes in order to be able to abstract.” As that analysis proceeds, the linguist moves from the study of sentences, words, and suffixes to investigating larger units of meaning, just as “every speaking human being” passes through similarly complex trains of language processing, “analyzing in order to synthesize, and synthesizing in order to be able to speak.”115 This and numerous other sketches did not serve Saussure as illustrations of research practice, which in fact he barely pursued himself. They were thinking tools, means of understanding and articulating complex contents. Saussure counterposed the “acoustics of the eyes” proposed by the experimental phoneticians in Paris with a kind of “visual reasoning” in order to feel his way into the labor of synthesis carried out in the minds of a linguistic community, and thence to set off on the path to a general linguistics.116 Returning from these paper experiments to Saussure’s remark in the Cours concerning the new phonogram archives emerging in Vienna and Paris in the first years of the twentieth century, it becomes clear that Saussure’s enthusiasm for these projects was prompted by their focus on living and audible languages, just as the linguistics that he envisioned was to concentrate on the audible elements of language. To be sure, Saussure’s linguistics drew only partial inspiration from the methods of Ferdinand Brunot and others who used the new recording devices to study the external acoustic phenomena of living languages. More essential was the concept of the auditory image, as proposed by Victor Egger in La parole intérieure. In Saussure’s Paris notebooks of 1881 to 1884 and in his posthumously published Phonétique, he ascribed two functions to the auditory image: a psychical precondition for speech and a structuring element of language. In this dual role, the auditory image enables the formation of differential units of language (phonemes, words). Already at this early stage, Saussure required of linguists “an inventory” and “bare description” of a language’s auditory images, of the resulting sounds of language, and ultimately of the entirety of a period’s “linguistic states.”117 As Saussure’s later disagreement with Genevan psychophysiologist Théodore Flournoy makes plain, the auditory image would become the most crucial element of his theory of language; the visual, written image of a phoneme or word was only secondary. This emphasis gave rise to a task spelled out once again in the Cours: if linguistic states are sustained and gradually modified by acoustic communicative circuits, linguistics must seek to capture the totality of these circuits. The “phonologist” introduced by Saussure will investigate both the external sound of the words and the

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internal sound-images of their speakers. With the greatest possible precision, this phonologist will then analyze the relationships between individual sound-images in order to derive the rules, regularities, and values of a linguistic system. Faced with an undertaking of such dimensions, Saussure neither found the new possibilities presented by phonography to be sufficient, nor did he—as is often asserted—revert to a linguistics of the alphabet and of the written form.118 Although he mainly worked with written documents, Saussure’s interest in the language system (langue) related less to written images than to speech (parole), or more precisely, to auditory images and the whole system of sounds that makes speech possible. After all, Saussure reminded his students in the Cours, “the ear is what tells us that a particular sound is a b, or a t, etc.”119 Accordingly, the linguist’s most important sources are not texts or sound recordings per se, but sources that offer insight into the auditory memory of a language community. It is the task of the linguist to explain a language as precisely as possible based on these sources, using abundant notes and drawings to simulate a language community if necessary. What if Saussure’s Parisian colleague Brunot had asked him to contribute explanations to the sound recordings held in the Archives de la parole, explanations like the ones Saussure himself called for in the Cours? Toward the end of his life, Saussure did not enjoy writing or publishing. His preferred medium was the university lecture, presented orally to his Genevan students—possibly because it was there that Saussure was able to perform the seemingly infinite exchange of words described in his theory of speech circuits. Perhaps, though, he would have picked up his pencil and sent Brunot drawings of many different heads. Those drawings would make two points. They would place the recorded speakers in the context of a community of any number of other speakers, who form sound-images in their minds and thereby make possible both the specific speech act and the system of language in general. And they would reveal that a speaker is not the master of language, but rather one of many, and has adopted language from the mouths and minds of preceding generations. At the same time, Saussure would have shown Brunot how difficult it is to catalogue the language of a speaker, let alone of a whole linguistic community, whether through drawings or through explanatory texts.

The Philosopher’s Ear When Saussure obtained his doctoral degree and moved to France in 1880, Henri-Louis Bergson was still a student at the École normale supérieure

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in Paris and worked as an assistant in the school’s library on rue d’Ulm. One day, a pile of books was lying unprotected on the bare library floor. A passing professor is supposed to have asked Bergson if that didn’t pain the young librarian’s soul. “No,” Bergson’s classmates replied in unison: “He doesn’t have a soul!”120 If scarcely a biography of Henri Bergson omits this anecdote, that is because it illustrates a core concern of the philosopher’s later work. There, too, Bergson revised the classical conception of the soul. At the same time, he emphasized the independence of the human spirit from the material world of objects and bodies. In the following pages, I reconstruct Bergson’s explanation of that independence in respect to thinking with sound. Describing how the human spirit is not determined by the material world, but rather takes it and “stamp[s] it with its own freedom,”121 Bergson again and again invoked the motif of acoustic perception. In his work, hearing—spoken words, the sounds of bells, music—forms an interface between the physical and metaphysical. It proves to be paradigmatic for his philosophy. To a certain extent, Bergson’s interest in hearing responded to the aphasia and brain research of his Parisian milieu, in which the human processing of language and sound was considered a purely material, cerebral process. Not unlike Ferdinand de Saussure, Bergson picked up and reinterpreted the notion of the “auditory image” from neuroanatomy; at times his deliberations came very close to those of Saussure, who considered “thought-sound” a mediator between matter and ideas. But whereas Saussure was mainly interested in how thinking in auditory images shapes whole language communities and linguistic systems, Bergson wished to demonstrate that auditory images are located not in the brain, but in the mind. The goal of his metaphysical explanatory model was twofold. Bergson wanted to establish a new epistemology of our sense of time and space, along with all phenomena related to that sense, including the perception of sound events. Additionally, he was pursuing a science policy agenda. In the period around 1900, when the life and natural sciences were rapidly gaining ground, he complemented the sciences with an equally powerful philosophy of life that could make phenomena tied to time and space accessible in a new and different way. To this end, Bergson entered dialogue with his Paris colleagues and with many other renowned scientists and scholars. The conversation did not always remain amicable. He enjoined Albert Einstein, for example, to put aside his clocks and chronometers, indeed his whole theory of relativity, for once and listen instead to the sound of an orchestra. As we will see, Einstein did not take kindly to Bergson’s advice.

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The World in Images The conjunction “and” does not necessarily always connect two things that belong together. The “and” in Bergson’s 1896 study Matière et mémoire: Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (translated into English in 1911 as Matter and Memory) invokes the duality of body and soul, with its rich tradition in Western philosophy. Bergson proposed that this dualism be rethought and overcome without entirely rejecting the ontological distinction of body and mind. As the French subtitle indicates, he preferred to speak of a “relationship between” them. That relationship turns out to be complex. Bergson refuted the assumption that if only we could “penetrate the interior of a working brain and witness the back-and-forth dance of the atoms of which the cortex consists,” we would be able to deduce the states of consciousness, even the mental images, of a human being.122 Here, Bergson is challenging the materialist reduction of human thought to secretions of the brain as proposed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century physiologists from Pierre Cabanis to Carl Vogt, Ludwig Büchner, and Jacob Moleschott and taken up in Bergson’s own era by positivist research on aphasia.123 Bergson acknowledged attempts by neuroanatomists such as Paul Broca, Jean-Martin Charcot, and Carl Wernicke to localize the basic centers of sensory processing in the brain; what he found untenable, though, were the neurophysiological theories of pathways and association that accompanied these attempts from Theodor Meynert to Sigmund Freud and onward.124 For Bergson, perception, memory, and thought neither originate in “cerebral tracks,” nor are they the result of spontaneous neural associations.125 Bergson engaged deeply with the work of Théodule Ribot, who, starting in 1889, held the chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the Collège de France—the Parisian institution to which Bergson was appointed twelve years later. At first sight, Bergson’s and Ribot’s interests appear to be diametrically opposed. Although Ribot also regarded himself as a philosopher, he espoused an autonomous psychology, quite distinct from metaphysics and transcendentalism, that would be open to the insights and experimental methods of the life sciences.126 Bergson’s concern, by contrast, was to defend the role of transcendental philosophy in the face of the aspiring life sciences as sponsored by Ribot. Despite that difference, or perhaps precisely because of it, Bergson read the neurological studies of his colleague with the greatest of care. In Bergson’s private library, part of which survives today, there is an edition of Ribot’s Les maladies de la mémoire (1881; Diseases of Memory, 1882). As Ribot’s most popular book, it boasts twenty-nine editions and

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numerous translations—Bergson owned a copy of the eighth edition, published in 1893, which he marked up in pencil. When he was working on Matière et mémoire, in other words, Bergson was reading about Ribot’s view of memory as a “biological fact” (fait biologique).127 He noted that for Ribot there is no singular “memory” as such, but a range of particular, independent, “special,” or “local memories,”128 which are based on associations both natural (innate) and dynamic (acquired through repetition). Each memory has a particular seat in the nervous system.129 Ribot’s claim emphasizes that these forms of memory do not, as metaphysics had traditionally assumed, reside in the soul; at the same time, his term “seat” (siège) sidesteps the debate around clearly localizable areas in the human brain. Instead, Ribot spoke of complex “nervous elements” that are subject to constant modification.130 As we will see, Bergson found much to like in this notion of special memories. Initially, though, he placed an emphatic question mark next to Ribot’s postulate of a purely material memory situated in the brain (figure 3.7). For Bergson, the memory is more than the sum of cerebral processes. Memory belongs only partially, he postulated in Matière et mémoire (soon after reading Ribot), to the brain and thus to the material world.131 The brain, especially the cerebrum, serves to analyze, select, and organize neurologically transmitted sensations, but it does not generate representations and recollections.132 For Bergson, mental and memory images neither exist solely in a human being’s mind, nor are they completely controlled by the material world. While honing this theory, Bergson developed a concept of the image that is still influential today.133 Bergson’s image is “more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing;—an existence placed half-way between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation.’”134 Accordingly, Bergson described the material world as image-like, but not the source of images. The human body and the brain do not generate images; as part of the material world, they are themselves images, and it would be absurd to claim “that the container should issue from the content.”135 Nonetheless, Bergson remarked, the body remains the human being’s physical form of existence, bestowing time and space, and it is only through the body that the world can be perceived in images. The body is a kind of master-image, which “occupies the centre of representation.”136 All other images and the representations that result from them issue from the body and range around it. But physical “perception in its unmixed state,” without memory, is an ideal—a fiction, or as Bergson saw it, a limit case.137 According to Bergson, human beings never perceive solely corporeally. Their mental creativity

Figure 3.7: In his copy of Les maladies de la mémoire of 1893, Bergson marked up the paragraph on page 7 where Ribot introduces his hypotheses on the organic similarity of the specialized memories and their evolution through memory traces and associations. Chancellerie des Universités de Paris—Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Fonds Henri Bergson BGN, 526.

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Figure 3.8: Bergson’s diagram showing the generation of a memory-image (souvenir-image) out of the realm of ideas, or “pure recollection” (souvenir pur). The memory-image both takes shape through bodily perception and inscribes itself into perception. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (first published in French in 1896), translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: Allen & Unwin, 1911), 170.

always intervenes in processes of representation, knowledge, and recall. To explain this more precisely, Bergson set out a second ideal: the immaterial world of ideas, out of which spring “pure recollections, summoned from the depths of memory.”138 Such pure recollections would be unextended, powerless, and unconscious. As Bergson showed in diagrammatic form (figure 3.8), they are also not image-like, though they materialize in the form of perceptible “memory-images.”139 Bergson’s simple, linear schema offers a critical response to the ever more complicated diagrams, bustling with centers and associative pathways, that were being drafted in contemporary aphasia research (see chapter 2). Bergson believed that those schemata lost sight of the most important thing: the ideational world, the creative force behind the world of images. Ideas were still present in Jean-Martin Charcot’s bell model in the form of an “intellectual center,” but they had already begun to lose ground in Wernicke’s work.140 For Bergson, it was crucial to reintroduce the immaterial world of ideas, even in an ideal state.

The Mind’s Ear In Bergson’s view, then, memory images and mental images more generally arise from the interaction of physical and mental activities. The same is true of what Bergson called an auditory image (image auditive). The auditory image, he wrote, draws its acoustic material from sensory perception,

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but without precisely reproducing auditory impressions from the external world—rather, the mind combines the numerous sounds that are materially perceived and assembles abstract auditory images out of them.141 The auditory image of a particular word, for example, “is not an object with well-defined outlines; for the same word pronounced by different voices, or by the same voice on different notes, gives a different sound.”142 Whereas associationist theories assume “that there are as many auditory images of the same word as there are pitches of sound and qualities of voice . . . [and] all these images are treasured up in the brain,”143 Bergson postulated that in fact for every word there is just one auditory image, which comprises the entirety of the memory images. It is this abstract image that allows participants in a conversation to isolate individual tones and verbal combinations out of a continuous mass of sound.144 When we listen, the image adapts itself to the acoustic, syntactical, and associative context of what is being said. Just consider, Bergson exhorted, “the host of different relations which can be expressed by the same word, according to the place it occupies and the terms which it unites.”145 Bergson did not dispute the associationist line, initiated by Hitzig and pursued by Wernicke, Charcot, Ballet, and others, that there are no pure auditory images. Instead, all mental images result from the complex interplay of the ideational center with various sensory centers (auditory, visual, and motor).146 Thus, when language is acquired, the motor representations arise first, and only later the auditory representations; when the language is used, these two sensory representations become inseparably connected to the idea of a word. Word-images, then, are usually accompanied by concrete, internal movements of speech. The tongue, lips, and larynx move in ways similar to the movements of external speech, though more faintly.147 Bergson even went so far as to claim that the acoustic perception of language cannot take place without accompanying motor phenomena. The same goes for language production, because verbal recollections “need, for their actualization, a motor ally, and . . . require for their recall a kind of mental attitude which must itself be engrafted upon an attitude of the body.”148 Bergson sought to underline this mental attitude. For him, auditory images exist only at the moment of their actualization by the mind. Bergson’s emphasis on the mind’s ear constitutes a further attack on the notion, current in brain research at the time, of “the existence, within the cortex, of auditory memories slumbering.”149 That hypothesis, he warned, leads to another error of the neuroanatomists and aphasia researchers: the belief that lesions in brain centers result in the loss of mental images.150 For Bergson, mental representations are also the products of the mind or

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spirit, and as this is not damaged by brain injury, neither can its images be lost. A person can only forfeit the physical capacity to translate sensory impressions into concrete images or to actualize memories in the form of images.151 The provocative impact of Bergson’s claims within contemporary brain research can well be imagined,152 especially as the philosopher tended to turn aphasia researchers’ case studies to his own purposes, renarrating and unceremoniously reinterpreting them. “A patient of Charcot’s,” he wrote in Matière et mémoire, “attacked by a passing word deafness, relates that he heard his clock strike, but that he could not count the strokes.”153 In the same passage, Bergson cited a similar case described by Gilbert Ballet in Le langage intérieur, inferring from both these cases that aphasia sufferers can hear without making sense of what they hear. Charcot and Ballet would probably have accepted that interpretation—but they would hardly have concurred with Bergson’s conclusion that auditory images must therefore have their origin in the uninjured human spirit. Neither Charcot nor Ballet conceded such a well-defined origin of sensory imagery. Clearer parallels can be found between Bergson’s definition of the auditory image (répresentation auditive; image auditive) and Saussure’s auditory or acoustic image (image auditive; image acoustique).154 For both scholars, auditory images exist only in the abstract, as representations that enable and steer the perception of language. They are the hinge between a realm of ideas and acoustic communication. Bergson would have been unaware of Saussure’s Paris notes or of his work on the study Phonétique. It is also unlikely that the two men ever met in person, as soon after Saussure arrived in France in 1880, Bergson was awarded his philosophy degree and began to work at high schools and universities in Angers and ClermontFerrand. Bergson returned to Paris right after completing his dissertation, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889; Time and Free Will, 1910), by which time Saussure was already on his way back to Geneva. It is most likely that Saussure’s and Bergson’s definitions of the auditory image were both, separately, inspired by the Parisian discourse on inner speech (Victor Egger) and inner language (Gilbert Ballet).155 Ultimately, Saussure cared less about the genesis of individual auditory images than about the connections among the entirety of sound-images at work in a linguistic community. Bergson, in contrast, deployed the notion of auditory images to describe more precisely the creativity of the human mind, which analyzes images, generalizes from them, and uses them to produce new images. For Bergson, the fact that auditory images are unharmed in brain-injured aphasia patients demonstrates the independence of the spiritual from the material world.

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Metaphors That Matter In Matière et mémoire, Bergson disparaged the “strange hypothesis of recollections stored in the brain, which are supposed to become conscious as though by a miracle, and bring us back to the past by a process that is left unexplained.”156 It was not just the brain researchers’ storage metaphor that bothered the philosopher here; worse was the view of the past as being a phenomenon that can be easily retrieved in memory and accessed with almost complete immediacy. Bergson’s own definition of remembering is as a practice that always relates to the present. In our everyday life, he argued, past and present are inevitably connected when we combine the mental recollection and its physical perception or, where necessary, create new mental images.157 In order to translate pure recollections into images, an active mental effort is required. One must be able to abstract from “the action of the moment” and dare to dream,158 though even then, it is impossible to leave the present aside completely. For Bergson, the brain is not a storage medium for things past, but a discreet servant of body and mind. He compared the brain to a piano standing quietly in a room. Only through external sensory impressions does it become “an immense keyboard, on which the external object executes at once its harmony of a thousand notes.” But this piano has a double claviature: an external one upon which external objects play and an internal one, a “mental ear,” upon which the memory images are generated.159 In other words, “the [brain] centres in which the elementary sensations seem to originate may be actuated, in some sort, from two different sides, from in front and from behind. From the front they receive impressions sent in by the sense-organs, and consequently by a real object; from behind they are subject, through successive intermediaries, to the influence of a virtual object.”160 Bergson’s choice of a piano metaphor is no coincidence. His father, Michał Bergson, was a pianist and composer from Warsaw.161 When Henri-Louis was born in 1859, his father was working on Qui va à la chasse perd sa place, his third and final opera, which premiered at the soon-tobe-bankrupt Théâtre Lyrique in Paris. Michał Bergson subsequently concentrated on composing piano études and Polish folk songs, including the Polonaise héroïque, still well known today. Henri-Louis is said to have taken piano lessons with his father starting at the age of four, when the musical family spent some years in Geneva and Michał Bergson became a professor, then the director, at the city’s musical conservatory.162 Three years later, the Bergsons had already returned to Paris. When his parents moved on to London, Henri-Louis, now aged ten, remained in Paris and

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embarked on a classic academic career in philosophy.163 Nevertheless, many of his writings show a continued affinity with music. By comparing brain and piano, Bergson also emphasized that the cerebral nervous system does not perform work of its own, beyond its task of receiving and responding to internal and external stimuli: “The nervous system is in no sense an apparatus which may serve to fabricate, or even to prepare, representations.”164 Bergson found a further metaphor for this passivity of the brain, the “central telephonic exchange.”165 In this comparison, he followed American psychologist William James, who in The Principles of Psychology (1890) had compared the brain to a “commutating switch-board at a central telephone station.”166 Like James, Bergson argued that the function of the brain is solely “to allow communication, or to delay it. It adds nothing to what it receives.”167 Yet for Bergson, there are conversational partners on both sides of the telephone exchange, and their respective roles must not be underestimated. The human mind takes on the role of the caller. It speaks with the sensory perceptions but refuses to be told which of these perceptions it must call. The wider the range of options and the more fully the mind utilizes its capacity for “discernment,” the higher its “degree of independence.”168 As well as having been inspired by William James, Bergson’s choice of metaphor may have been drawn from his immediate technological environment. No other country at this time had more telephone exchanges than France. In the United States, the Bell Telephone Company, which later became the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), held the monopoly over the country’s telecommunications network with only short interruptions,169 whereas in France, postal, telegraphic, and telephone services were the preserve of the Ministry of Finance. Because the telephone network could not easily be mapped onto the existing telegraphic network maintained by the Post Office (two lines being needed for each connection), additional concessions were granted to regional entrepreneurs. The network was parceled out, and each provider maintained its own central exchange. When Bergson was working on Matière et mémoire, there were more than ten thousand telephone exchanges in France (figure 3.9). As a high school teacher, Bergson is unlikely to have had his own telephone in 1896. Compared with the United States and neighboring European countries, France had very few telephone subscribers and the costs were high.170 This scarcity and cost were probably among the reasons why the telephone became such a frequently invoked object of fantasy and desire in French literature. In Les cinq cents millions de la Bégum (1879), for example, Jules Verne describes an international telephone conference,

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Figure 3.9: For Bergson, the functioning of the human brain can be compared with one of the numerous telephone exchanges in turn-of-the-century France, as shown in this anonymous photogravure. The exchanges were operated mainly by young women from bourgeois families, the demoiselles du téléphone. “Les demoiselles du téléphone. Aspect d’un bureau téléphonique parisien,” anonymous photogravure in Le Petit journal. Supplément du dimanche, April 17, 1904, 128. Bibliothèque National de France, gallica.bnf.fr.

and in Le château des Carpathes (1892) he even imagines audiovisual telecommunication.171 In Bergson’s work, it is the mind and the sensory impressions that communicate by phone. The central exchange connecting them is the brain. Likely in order to sustain his conceit, Bergson additionally compared the brain to a charged electrical circuit. He stressed its closed nature: “All the elements, including the perceived object itself, hold each other in a state of mutual tension as in an electric circuit, so that no disturbance starting from the object can stop on its way and remain in the depths of the mind.”172 The brain stands guarantor for the electric circuit that joins mind and matter. But the mind has a choice: the more it concentrates upon an object, the tighter the circuit of perception becomes and the clearer the mental representations. Bergson illustrated this concept using the example of a conversation overheard by chance. “A word from a foreign language, uttered in my hearing, may make me think of that language in general or

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Figure 3.10: Bergson’s diagram explains how the mind can derive very different mental images from one and the same sensorimotor perception (S): AB is the “totality of the memories” that the mind associates with sensations, an intellectualized “life of dreams.” Within AB, “there is room . . . for a thousand repetitions of our psychical life, figured by as many sections AʹBʹ, AʺBʺ, etc., of the same cone.” Those individual recollections become more and more concrete the more one responds to sensory stimuli. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (first published in French in 1896), translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: Allen & Unwin, 1911), 211.

of a voice which once pronounced it in a certain way.”173 When the degree of tension in the mind is low, the auditory images take on a general form; when concentration is greater, they become specific. The degree of concentration is what decides which image becomes a representation. Once again, Bergson illustrated this with a simple diagram (figure 3.10). Bergson’s use of the electrical metaphor was influenced not only by the advancing electrification of France, but also, and even more, by the work of Théodule Ribot. Ribot based his ideas to a great extent on the notion of neural energy flows in the brain. He described memory as a “process of organization [of variable degrees of tension].”174 The highest and most complex degree is occupied by psychological or psychical memory, which becomes active in experiences and memories of a certain intensity, tension, and duration.175 This psychological memory gives rise to the unconscious and consciousness, the latter being described by Ribot as the sense of time, the ability to anchor memory contents in time—as “vision in time.”176 In Ribot’s view, however, the majority of memory activity takes place organically, unconsciously, and is expressed in automatic practices such as riding, making music, or climbing stairs.177 Finally, there are activi-

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ties in which both forms of memory cooperate—such as learning a language, which is carried out partly consciously and partly unconsciously.178 In Matière et mémoire, Bergson rejected Ribot’s material view of memory. It is the brain, not memory, that Bergson described through the material metaphors of the piano, the telephone exchange, and the charged electrical circuit. Nevertheless, Bergson did draw inspiration from Ribot’s theory of distinct faculties of memory with differing degrees of concentration. On the one hand, Bergson wrote, there is a motor memory that is acquired through practice, functions almost mechanically, and is “always bent upon action, seated in the present and looking only to the future.”179 On the other, there is the “independent memory,” which consciously or unconsciously produces recollections and mental images.180 When learning a lesson by heart, for example, it is the motor memory that prevails; it reproduces what was learned in its own temporality, word for word. But if one thinks back intensely to the moments when that learning took place, recollections are awoken of sitting at the desk, walking around the room, or reciting the lesson time and again.181 This true memory surveys the action in its pure duration, and grasps it “instantaneously, as in one picture.”182 Like Ribot, Bergson attributed different experiences of time to these different forms of memory. Consequently, there are different memories of auditory phenomena such as music, noises, and the spoken word.

Time to Listen Bergson’s epistemology of the experience of time picks up on the antagonism of “two cultures” within philosophy that was fought between the adherents of spiritualism and those of empiricism in secularist France.183 In the nineteenth century, this opposition found expression in the methodological dispute between Victor Cousin and Auguste Comte. Cousin, a proponent of spiritualism, championed introspection and reflexivity; Comte defended the methods of empirical observation. As director of the École normale supérieure and Minister of Education, in addition to other powerful positions, Cousin initially prevailed, but an 1868 survey of philosophy in France (the first of its kind) by Félix Ravaisson reveals that Cousin’s views began to lose currency after his death.184 As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Hippolyte Taine, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Théodule Ribot succeeded in institutionally establishing a subdiscipline of philosophy, entitled empirical psychology, oriented on the methods of the natural sciences.185 Bergson wanted neither to return to the eclecticism of Cousin nor to join forces with Ribot’s school. Instead, he placed himself in the tradition

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of Ravaisson, little known today, and Ravaisson’s reassessment of spiritualism as a core discipline of philosophy or, rather, of the sciences morales of nineteenth-century France. In Matière et mémoire, Bergson praised Ravaisson’s “profound” contributions and his distinction between material sensory perception and “pure spirit” (pur esprit).186 The pure mind or spirit, Ravaisson wrote, forgets nothing. It is always active; it is all memory, all duration, and from that vantage point it can see everything that it is, was, and will be.187 This notion of the spirit rooted in duration fed into Bergson’s philosophy of life, a new metaphysics of life and time. Life, for Bergson, is the experience of time, though he distinguished between two such experiences: that of extended time, which manifests as movement in space and is subject to measurement and comprehension, and that of unextended duration, which can only be grasped intuitively. When describing these two modes of experiencing time in more detail, Bergson often chose examples related to listening. In the early Time and Free Will, he discussed different ways of experiencing the sound of bells. One may listen to the bells analytically, he wrote, counting their successive strokes and perceiving a rhythm separated by empty intervals.188 Or, one may hear the sound of the bells in its “pure duration,”189 as a connected whole like a “musical phrase.”190 It is hardly a coincidence that Bergson here employed the concept of the phrase, which in music theory designates a melodic unit that is usually longer than a motif and shorter than a period, but cannot be defined more precisely in terms of time.191 When listening to music, Bergson found similar forms of aesthetic experience. Music can on the one hand be approached diagnostically as rhythm and thus as part of a symbolic order. The listener takes pleasure in predicting the course of a piece through rhythm and meter, borne along by a sense of pride in understanding and mastering the music. That perception, however, is deceptive: the strict regimen of music is what masters the listener. The “periodic returns of the measure are like so many invisible threads by means of which we [the musicians] set in motion this imaginary puppet [the listener].”192 On the other hand, in a figure evidently inspired by the popular treatment practices of Charcot and others, Bergson described a suggestiveness in music. Sometimes in music, “the rhythm and measure suspend the normal flow of our sensations and ideas by causing our attention to swing to and fro between fixed points.”193 Then, music accumulates such force that it completely dominates the listener’s feelings. Bergson considered this effect to be even stronger than that of nature, because “nature confines itself to expressing feelings, whereas music suggests them to us.”194 True musical listening, in Bergson’s view, demands an attitude of mind that is open to such suggestion. In this technique,

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analytical listening is suppressed. The listener is cradled by the composition and senses it purely qualitatively, as a rhythmic totality that “may be compared to a living being whose parts, although distinct, permeate one another just because they are so closely connected.”195 Recently, there has been speculation as to whether Bergson’s thoughts on musical listening anticipate the work of Claude Debussy, especially Pelléas et Mélisande (1902). After the premiere of Debussy’s “drame lyrique” at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, reviewers described the work as a composition equal to nature, highlighting the materiality of the sound and at the same time impenetrable, resisting clear harmonies, melodies, and classical musical forms or temporal structures.196 But Bergson barely mentioned the music of his day, either in Time and Free Will or anywhere else in his writings.197 Only late in Bergson’s life did the Swiss writer Jacques Mercanton, who visited him in Saint-Cergue in 1938, make known the philosopher’s reverence for Beethoven. In Bergson’s study, Mercanton reported, a gramophone stood on a little table. Bergson explained that he had been listening to music frequently since old age had limited his mobility; he enthusiastically discussed Beethoven and music critic Romain Rolland’s essays.198 We can assume that, obeying the self-declared music psychologist Rolland, Bergson listened to Beethoven’s music not analytically, but as an expression of passion, willpower, and inner tragedy.199 But let us move from Bergson as a music lover back to the role of listening in his epistemology of “pure duration.” Bergson’s different modes of musical listening correspond to his distinction between two forms of existence in the human subject: the self “refracted, and thereby broken to pieces” that seeks to comprehend musical form and the “deeper” or “fundamental self ” that lets itself be carried away, or even hypnotized, by music.200 Bergson’s “fundamental self ” seems to have almost Romantic, conservative features, an ideal of pure interiority that is able to empathize with the objects of the exterior world.201 Most relevant for the present purpose, however, is the clear dividing line that Bergson drew between his own view of the subjective unconscious and psychophysiological interpretations of the unconscious as offered by Ribot and later by Freud’s psychoanalysis.202 For Bergson, what is subjective and unconscious does not arise from neurophysiological processes; it is virtual, indivisible, and for that very reason capable of sensing pure duration. But the active human being represses that fact, retaining in consciousness only what is required to “give useful work.” Just a few “superfluous recollections”—“messengers from the unconscious”—hint at “what we are dragging behind us unawares.”203 Regardless, past events constantly accumulate and are preserved as duration and the “continuous progress

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of the past.”204 One way of experiencing this duration is listening to, or recalling, music. In that sense, musical experience and philosophizing are comparable activities for Bergson. Making that point became almost a political project for him.

Positioning the Philosophy of Life Matière et mémoire helped Bergson on his journey to a university career. In 1897, one year after the book was published, he was appointed maître de conférences at the École normale supérieure. In 1900, he accepted the chair of ancient philosophy at the Collège de France, where he switched to modern philosophy in 1904. Théodule Ribot, who had requested retirement from the Collège de France in 1901, was his immediate colleague only for a short time, though Bergson’s critical reading of Ribot’s work suggests a working year marked by controversy. Nonetheless, the philosopher held the psychologist in high regard. And when Ribot left, it was Bergson who campaigned for Pierre Janet’s appointment to maintain Ribot’s chair and the laboratory for experimental and comparative psychology.205 Bergson did not want to abolish the experimental life sciences, but to complement them with an equally significant philosophy of life and time. For Bergson, time is an ineluctable category, independent of space, because it is given immediately to consciousness.206 Only reason subdivides this “pure duration” back into segments, temporal forms, and rhythms.207 Viewed in this way, time is relative. Its behavior differs from that of the standard time of physics, an “imaginary homogeneous time.”208 For the positive natural sciences, Bergson wrote, standard time is an objective reference point; modern science “must be defined pre-eminently by its aspiration to take time as an independent variable.”209 This epistemological interest is comparable with the “contrivance” of the cinematograph and other recording technologies at the turn of the twentieth century, which “take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality.”210 In Bergson’s view, such methods are also taken for granted and internalized by the life sciences to such an extent that science rarely fails to “set going a kind of cinematograph inside us.”211 Bergson argued instead for a second kind of knowledge, a philosophy of life that can capture what eludes positivist science. Such a philosophy would, “by an effort of sympathy,” transport us into the interior of becoming. For instead of snapshots in time, “only arrests of our attention,” it is “the flow of time, . . . the very flux of the real that we should be trying to follow.”212 Overheated as these words from L’évolution créatrice of 1907 (Creative Evolution, 1911) may sound today, they brought Bergson enormous success

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Figure 3.11: Waiting in line for Bergson’s lectures in auditorium no. 8 of the Collège de France in 1914. Photographs from the title page of Excelsior. Journal illustré quotidien, February 14, 1914. Bibliothèque National de France, gallica.bnf.fr.

at the time. Starting in the 1910s, students, fellow scholars, writers, intellectuals, and ladies and gentlemen of fashion literally lined up to attend Bergson’s lectures on rue des Écoles (figure 3.11). A contemporary commentator described the scene: “The lecture theater is invaded by ‘snobinettes,’ who go there en masse because, it seems, it is what one does . . . and, in the auditorium where the philosopher speaks, quantities of ostrich plumes quiver in time to the phrases that the master’s eloquence pours onto his charming listeners.”213 Bergson was in fashion. In Paris, there

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were calls for larger auditoriums, even an amphitheater, for the philosopher to speak in. It was in 1922, at the pinnacle of Bergson’s career, that his famous clash with Albert Einstein began. The differences of opinion between Einstein and Bergson regarding the theory of relativity, religious belief, politics, and even vegetarianism have already been examined in detail.214 Of interest here is the first encounter between the two men, which was arranged in April 1922 by the Société française de philosophie.215 The meeting was designed to enable a constructive exchange of views, given that Einstein and Bergson seemed to be pursuing the same objectives from different disciplinary perspectives. Both regarded time not as an absolute and universal magnitude, but as something relative and dependent on the standpoint of the beholder. At the April meeting, however, Bergson staked out in no uncertain terms the distinctions between his and Einstein’s notions of time and space. As the transcript shows, Bergson proposed that when Einstein measured time with clocks, or rather with electromagnetic signals, he was forgetting the human being who reads the clocks and knows how to interpret the measurements. Without the knowledge of “knowing the time” (le “savoir l’heure”), time makes no sense.216 Einstein’s theory of relativity, too, relies on the assumption of differences in time that can be objectively and exactly measured—yet the simultaneity of two non-simultaneous events can only be imagined by and for the human being. The same is true for musical experts, who must listen to an orchestra piece analytically. Otherwise, asked Bergson, “how does a practiced ear perceive at every moment the overall sound of the orchestra and nevertheless picks out . . . the notes of two or several instruments?”217 Einstein was no less forthright in explaining how misunderstood he felt, or more specifically, how profoundly Bergson had misunderstood the general theory of relativity. Einstein was concerned not with the changing tempi of an orchestral piece, but with temporal orders that exist on their own account, independent of human perception, such as the speed of light. He had thus, Einstein declared, progressed from psychological perceptions of simultaneity to the simultaneity of “objective events.” Einstein added a sentence that would hit Bergson particularly hard: “Consequently, there is no such thing as a philosopher’s time; there is only a psychological time differing from a physicist’s time.”218 Furious, Bergson proceeded to write an entire book “à propos de la théorie de Einstein,” and kept up a running commentary on Einstein’s later work.219 The very point of Bergson’s own deliberations was to demonstrate that there is a philosopher’s time, one that exists on an equal

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footing with the time of the physiologist and that of the physicist. As Bergson wrote in 1934 in La pensée et le mouvant (The Creative Mind, 1946), the physicist intelligently observes, measures, and calculates where the philosopher carries out an intuitive analysis. Such intuition is not to be confused with flights of fancy. The philosopher understands the laws posited by the physicist perfectly well. Not only that, he is quite capable of “correcting certain generalizations and of rectifying certain observations.” By descending “into our own inner selves,”220 we open up our view to “the totality of things,” which is located outside of standard physical time.221 The conflict between Bergson and Einstein—who both received Nobel prizes, Einstein for physics and Bergson for literature—was never resolved. Retrospectively, its persistence may be explained by a drifting apart of the natural sciences, which were becoming more and more complex, and the humanities, which were gaining strength both rhetorically and institutionally in the space between the traditional sciences morales and the newly defined sciences humaines. Describing the British academic landscape twenty years later, the physicist C. P. Snow called that shift the emergence of “two cultures,”222 but Bergson would hardly have accepted his diagnosis. For Bergson, philosophy itself had ample space for any number of cultures. A similar case had been made by Ferdinand de Saussure for linguistics.

Closing Conversation Let us close this chapter by imagining a dialogue that we may safely assume never took place between Ferdinand de Saussure and Henri Bergson. What might have happened if they had met? Surely, the two scholars would talk about language. Every language, they would agree, lives, renews itself, and changes in the minds of its speakers. To underline that point, Saussure and Bergson could both call on the concept of the auditory image, borrowed from aphasia research (Broca, Charcot, and Wernicke) and from debates among psychologists about “interior speech” (Egger and Ballet). Perhaps Saussure would produce from his pocket the celebrated little sketch showing the communicative circuit of a language community, where auditory images migrate from speaker to speaker, constantly changing as they go (figures 3.5a and 3.5b). Or he would dig out one of his oldest drawings, from his days in Paris, which indicates how the auditory image mediates between individual idea, concrete articulation, and aural comprehension (figure 3.3). Bergson would peruse the drawings with a smile—he could quite as well have made them himself, having described in just the same way the manner in which the auditory image, as a product

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of the mind, intervenes in linguistic communication. A similar sketch by Bergson, in fact, shows all memory images and representations springing from the realm of ideas and gradually taking on material form while continuing to serve as abstract representations (figure 3.8). There is another point on which the two men would probably agree. Not only did Saussure and Bergson both deploy their sketches skillfully as visual arguments for their respective epistemologies, their visualizations also invoke the increasingly complex schemas of association proposed by brain and aphasia researchers ranging from Meynert to Wernicke and Charcot to Freud. Bergson and Saussure responded to these diagrams with pencil drawings that were superficially simple, but relied on sophisticated humanistic theories. At stake for the linguist and philosopher alike was the regeneration of their own disciplines. Bergson endeavored to reconcile two positions that divided philosophy and its institutions in France: out of experimental psychology and traditional metaphysics, he derived a new philosophy of life. He shared with Saussure the aspiration of opening a traditionally humanistic discipline to the insights of the natural sciences—but without allowing it to become their servant. Bergson and Saussure agreed that the phenomena of life and its laws could not be accessed from the perspective of the positive sciences alone. Put differently, not everything can be explained by laws in the sense of the term used by the natural sciences. “To speak of a ‘linguistic law’ in general is like trying to lay hands on a ghost,” Saussure warned in the Cours, and more generally, “law” is too strong a term for that which linguistics is able to describe. For Saussure, a linguistic state is determined rather by the “regularities” and “arrangements” between the speakers. These are temporally limited, because language changes. The evolution of language, too, proceeds only partially according to laws—much is “accidental and particular in nature.”223 As a result, the linguist must think like a mathematician when investigating the generally valid regularities of a language on the synchronic level, and like a historian when investigating the events of diachronic language change. But not too precisely, Saussure insisted—after all, this object of research is social and alive. Saussure thus formulated a more tangible research agenda for linguistics than Bergson did for philosophy. They did, however, share the affirmation of the unceasing dynamism of their research objects. “That is why,” Bergson wrote with regard to the natural sciences, “every law in static form seems to us as a provisional installment or as a particular view of a dynamic law which alone would give us whole and definitive knowledge.”224 He regarded scientific laws as something no less relative than the sound of a piano, which can be generated by striking the strings from outside or

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by plucking them directly, or like an electrical circuit whose voltage can be changed at will. The world can neither be expressed in static laws nor registered cinematographically. Bergson therefore preferred to listen to it, like music, in its pure duration. Where does Edison’s phonograph fit into this story? As we have seen, no sooner had the invention been presented at the World’s Fair in Paris than a group of phoneticians and linguists (Havet, Bréal, Vaïsse, Rosapelly, Marey, Rousselot, and Brunot) began to put it to use in experimental studies of language. These experiments do not feature in Saussure’s notes from Paris. Only later, in the lectures that would make his name famous, did Saussure refer to the language recordings in the phonogram archive founded by Ferdinand Brunot. He advised his audience to treat Brunot’s recordings with caution and not to regard them as representative of a particular language. The system of a language, Saussure argued, cannot be investigated effectively without proper attention to the sum of the auditory images that take shape in the minds of the linguistic community as a whole. A similarly critical stance on phonography was taken by Bergson, who was residing in Paris when Charles Pathé opened his first phonograph store in 1894, shortly thereafter establishing a gramophone factory in the Paris suburb of Chatou with his brother Émile.225 Further retail outlets followed throughout central Paris.226 Henri Bergson was living on the boulevard de Beauséjour in the sixteenth arrondissement near the Bois de Boulogne. A store selling “machines parlantes” opened in 1906 not far away, on rue de Passy. Close to the Collège de France, place Marcelin Berthelot, there were four such stores. Yet Bergson expressly addressed phonography only at a rather late stage, in his 1919 collection L’énergie spirituelle (Mind-Energy, 1920). He did so as part of a renewed attack on the positivist brain research of his era, which defined the memory as a material storage device and invited comparisons with sensitive plates or gramophone disks.227 Once again, Bergson cited the generation of auditory images: “The same word, pronounced by different persons, or by the same person at different times in different sentences, gives phonograms which do not coincide with one another. How, then, can the recollection of the sound of a word—a recollection which is relatively invariable and unique—be comparable to a phonogram?”228 Saussure could not have made the case better. Like Bergson, he placed more trust in the human mind than in any inscription device; again like Bergson, he believed that the auditory image in the mind of a speaking human being is both more complex and more abstract than a phonographic recording. Bergson’s disagreement regarding the comparison of memory and the

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phonograph additionally draws parallels with the essay by Jean-Marie Guyau introduced at the beginning of this chapter. Guyau, however, took a less stringent position toward this recently invented media technology, calling it “the most delicate instrument” to serve as an analogy for the memory.229 Just as virtual images in the memory do not equate to the real objects, the phonograph gives only an echo of past voices and sound impressions. And just as the memory can retrieve the impressions stored in the brain in different ways—rapidly, indistinctly, or very precisely—the phonograph can accelerate or slow down the sounds inscribed as well as play them at the original speed. In Guyau’s view, what is unique about the memory is its partially unconscious creativity. The memory is like “a kind of [musical] scale of recollections.” Memory images may move up the scale, or be dispelled and sink back down, to live mutely “in the depths of our being.”230 Again and again, human beings adapt their memories to the present, fully aware that the images are not a copy of reality, an awareness that Edison’s apparatus lacks. It does not understand what it records and plays back; it cannot distinguish between past and present. Many of the figures of thought that marked Bergson’s philosophy can be found in rudimentary form in Guyau’s essay: the creative force of the memory, the dynamism and adaptability of memory images. But Guyau deployed the storage metaphor to give the unconscious a material foundation, perhaps again inspired by contemporary brain research. Memory in his essay is a superior recording and playback device because it is selfconscious. Bergson saw a much stronger demarcation between memory and matter, finding the origin and future of memory in a mental virtuality.231 The same is true of Saussure. For both men, thinking is first and foremost the task of the mind or spirit—and that includes thinking in sound.

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Sound as a Comparative Object P h y s ic s M e e t s P s yc hol o g y

In 1894, the Prague-based physicist Ernst Mach received a postcard from Viennese physiologist Sigmund Exner reminding his “highly honored colleague” of a lecture invitation. Mach had neglected to give the title of his lecture to the Vienna organizers of the sixty-sixth Meeting of German Naturalists and Physicians. “If you prefer,” wrote Exner with a note of provocation, “we could always write ‘Topic Withheld.’ It would be preferable, though, if we could name the title.”1 The missive contains nothing else, no personal message from Exner, no cordial greeting. This sole surviving piece of correspondence between Mach and Exner is revealing in its terseness. The personal acquaintance of the two men appears to date from that same Vienna meeting in September 1894, around a year before Mach took up his professorship at the University of Vienna. There, as a fellow of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, he probably knew several members of the Exner family. But the relationship between Mach and Sigmund Exner remained distant, restricted to a few reciprocal citations and brief critical remarks. This distance is all the more telling in that Exner and Mach both vigorously supported the Society of German Naturalists and Physicians in its aim of building (or rebuilding) bridges between psychology, physiology, and physics at a time when the disciplines were assuming increasingly distinct and specialized contours in the universities.2 The lecture that Mach held in Vienna in 1894, on Exner’s invitation, directly addressed the need for interdisciplinary research. Entitled “On the Principle of Comparison in Physics,” it argued that the pursuit of knowledge in physics cannot dispense with sensory perception or comparisons based on the senses.3 As in his earlier work, Mach called for findings in physics to be consistently flanked by perceptual psychology. This, he argued, was the only way to discover why physicists were so dependent on drawing comparisons with sensory impressions and analogies of thinking in sound especially.

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Exner was likely not particularly impressed by Mach’s lecture. The very same year, he presented a thorough critique of sensory judgment, Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklärung der psychischen Erscheinungen (1894; Outline of a physiological explanation of psychical phenomena). Sense perception, wrote Exner, is a deficient process, impossible to control. He would later conclude that objective research is possible only with the aid of precision instruments that assist sensory perception or even replace it, whereas Mach regarded technological aids not as something fundamentally different from sense perception, but as its logical consequence. The present chapter explores these two epistemologies, both informed by psychophysiology but very different in approach. Ernst Mach’s views become most apparent in his long-standing research on shock waves and, more generally, in his technique of “comparative listening” as proposed for several fields of applied physics. Sigmund Exner, too, would put epistemology into practice in his work on measurement devices for architectural acoustics and, in parallel, as the founder of the world’s first scientific phonogram archive in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Despite their differences, both scholars engaged with the vibrant sonic and musical cultures that surrounded them, trying to shape those cultures by means of applied research. Their intense promotion of applied acoustics is crucial to this book’s argument. The previous chapters have traced the emergence of a variety of concepts of “thinking with sound” in the life sciences, linguistics, and metaphysics, some of which also inspired medical treatment, psychoanalytic praxis, and (as chapters 5 and 6 will show) a range of applications in the humanities. In this chapter, I look at the process by which questions of auditory cognition extended into physics, material sciences, and architecture in the period around 1900, becoming key to debates on the value of precision instruments, “aural objectivity,” and the role of applied research in scientific discipline formation more generally.

Acoustics as a Bridge Discipline As a physicist with a lively interest in psychology, Ernst Mach was torn. He felt part of two disciplinary domains whose borders were just beginning to take shape in the European academic sphere. Spatially separated university departments and laboratories were arising; separate courses of study, associations, and journals were being founded. Even so, the universities still accommodated both domains under the umbrella of the “philosophical faculty.” Mach’s career makes his crossing between disciplines even more obvious. Having studied mathematics and natural sciences at

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the University of Vienna and spent time at the University of Graz, Mach was simultaneously appointed professor of philosophy and director of the physics department at the German-speaking Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague in fall 1867. During Mach’s early career in Prague, he had already tried to combine physics and psychology, regarding each discipline as an auxiliary of the other.4 To some extent, this rhetoric is reminiscent of Sigmund Freud’s later attempts to establish psychoanalysis as a philosophical adjunct to medicine (see chapter 2). But Freud’s ambitious goal was to found a completely new discipline, whereas Mach sought bridges between his home disciplines of physics and psychology. His ultimate chair, established specially for him at the University of Vienna in 1895, was designated “Philosophy, Especially the History of the Inductive Sciences.”5 By that point, Mach’s name had come to stand for an approach to natural science that was psychological and historiographical. One field of research well suited Mach’s multidisciplinary program was acoustics, or so Mach claimed in an 1892 article on the history of acoustics. The essay cites French mathematician Joseph Sauveur who, in 1701, was the first to project acoustics as a discipline dedicated to systematically investigating the physical nature of sound.6 Sauveur made some discoveries of importance to the new discipline—on phenomena such as consonance, beats, and resonance—that were subsequently adopted, corrected, and refined by physicists including Hermann von Helmholtz and Robert Smith. While accepting the significance of these findings, Mach objected that they had failed to supply a thorough, psychological explanation of acoustic phenomena.7 He called for acoustics to be built on broader disciplinary foundations, a project to which he would later make his own substantial contributions. Today, the reception of Mach’s acoustic research is very far from his ideal; his studies on shock waves, accommodation in hearing, the neural processing of acoustic information, the “tonal gestalt,” the Doppler effect, binaural sound localization, and architectural acoustics are all read from separate disciplinary perspectives.8 Yet epistemologically speaking, there is much common ground between them. Mach’s work consistently sought new ways of thinking with sound.

Seeing What Is Faster than Sound Mach’s most lasting contribution as a physicist is probably what is known today as the Mach number. In fluid dynamics, the Mach number (M) stands for the ratio of flow velocity (v) to the local speed of sound (c) in the same medium: M = v/c. If the Mach number is 1.0, a

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body is moving at the same speed as a regular sound impulse in the same compressible medium (water, air, or another gas). Speeds of more than Mach 1.2 are supersonic flows, speeds below Mach 0.8, subsonic flows. The Mach number therefore does not represent an absolute quantity; it is a dimensionless figure expressing the relationship between two quantities. That makes sound, or the speed of sound, a comparative magnitude. How did Mach arrive at this relational function of sound? Key to his thinking were Mach’s experiments on shock waves, which have been welldocumented by historians of science. If I revisit these experiments in the following, it is to trace how Mach’s theory of the speed of sound resulted from previous scholarship, his own long-term experimental research, and a new theory and praxis of multisensory observation. Mach carried out his first experiments on the shock waves of explosions and projectiles in Prague in the 1870s and 1880s. During this period, he was also elected rector of the University of Prague and made a name for himself through his commitment to high school science curriculum, the natural history association Lotos, and other causes.9 When the physics department of the University of Prague moved to the new natural sciences building on Viničná (Weinberggasse) in 1879, Mach received a generously equipped laboratory and set up an experimental system that developed over more than two decades. Describing his epistemological influences, Mach named the Belgian ballistician Louis-Henri-Frédéric Melsens as having directly inspired his research on shock waves.10 He met Melsens in 1881 during the International Exposition of Electricity in Paris, where the ballistician lectured on experiments with projectiles made of bronze, zinc, lead, tin, and copper hitting chalk-coated steel plates at speeds of up to 400 m/s.11 As well as the impressions of the bullets, the plates showed traces of what Melsens called projectiles-air. Melsens speculated that these “air projectiles” surround a flying body and develop their own momentum, though he was unable to determine their mass, volume, or density.12 Mach had already attempted to visualize spark waves and blast waves using soot-coated glass plates,13 but Melsens’s lecture opened his eyes to further possibilities. During fresh experiments with silver fulminate, he soon discovered air projectiles that hastened ahead of the blast material.14 The question now was how to confirm the existence of these projectiles. In the long term, Mach’s response would draw on observational techniques related to multisensory perception, but his first decade of experiments were based on vision alone. Best known today are his attempts to use photography. At first, Mach worked with schlieren observation, a method introduced by the chemist August Toepler in 1867 to visualize

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“very small inhomogeneities or changes in refraction [schlieren] in seemingly homogeneous, transparent media.”15 Using a time delay circuit, Toepler produced an electric spark and a light spark almost synchronously. The light illuminated the air pressure fluctuations generated by the electric spark and was reflected by them. Toepler observed the schlieren formation using a schlieren head lens (two convex lenses with a long focal length) and documented his observations in vivid drawings.16 Importantly for Mach’s later work, Toepler referred to the air pressure fluctuations generated by electric sparks as “sound waves,” prompting fierce debate among physicists.17 Could something that propagated faster than sound in the same medium be called a sound wave?18 In Toepler’s view, the answer was yes. His method, he explained, enabled the visualization of high-frequency tones produced by short, powerful impulses. It was a matter of indifference “whether the impulse is a single one, or whether many impulses recurring regularly evoke the impression of a tone at a particular pitch.”19 To counter his critics’ concerns, however, Toepler resolved to use the term “sound” for “every impression perceptible to the sense of hearing . . . , likewise the word ‘sound wave’ even for cases in which the air particles do not describe a full oscillation.”20 When Mach turned to Toepler’s methods in the late 1870s, compression waves of electric sparks, blasts, and projectiles still posed an epistemic challenge.21 In his early experiments on the air projectiles, Mach defined these waves as “longitudinal, spreading sound waves with a certainly very high propagation speed.”22 To prove their existence, he tried his hand at schlieren photography. After a series of failed experiments, Mach found an ally in Peter Salcher, professor of physics at the Imperial Marine Academy in Fiume (today’s Rijeka, Croatia). Salcher had met Toepler while completing his doctorate in Graz and, like Mach, was familiar with the schlieren method.23 In 1886 and 1887, under Mach’s guidance (though in his absence), Salcher conducted a series of ballistic experiments in a shed on the Fiume military compound. He produced photographs of large projectiles traveling at up to 530 m/s and sent a total of eighty photographic plates to Prague.24 An article Salcher coauthored with Mach in 1887 shows the experimental setup, a more elaborate version of Toepler’s electrical circuit (figure 4.1). Six rather blurred schlieren photographs were appended to the same publication (figure 4.2). Most important, however, were the diagrammatic drawings in which Mach and Salcher recorded their discovery (figure 4.3). For projectiles traveling at supersonic speeds (above 340 m/s), they sketched “a kind of stationary sound wave,”25 that is, almost circular head waves resulting from heated air in front of the projectile. Alongside the projectile, they

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Figure 4.1: Mach and Salcher’s 1887 experimental setup, with two breaks. At break I there are two electrodes encased in glass tubes. A projectile shot from a distance of 2 to 4 meters smashes the tubes and the electrodes discharge. After a short delay, a spark of light is induced at break II, illuminating the flying projectile. The compression waves around the projectile reflect the light; the reflections, focused with a schlieren apparatus, are captured through a lens (O) by a camera (K) on sensitive photographic plates. Ernst Mach and Peter Salcher, “Photographische Fixirung der durch Projectile in der Luft eingeleiteten Vorgänge,” Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften [Wien]. Mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliche Classe 95, Abt. 2 (1887), 765 (fig. 1).

saw elementary or spherical sound waves that together formed a conical shape (v), while the back part of the projectile marked another cone (h). Mach and Salcher calculated the angle of the front cone (α, the angle between the trajectory and the edge of the cone v) using the ratio of the velocity of sound (c) to the velocity of the projectile (v): sin α = c/v.26 The greater the projectile’s velocity, in other words, the smaller the angle. If the flow speed and the speed of sound are equal, sin α = 1. This formula states that the velocity of any projectile is to be expressed in relation to the velocity of sound (the object of comparison here) in the same medium. It was on this basis that, in 1929, Swiss aerodynamics engineer Jakob Ackeret immortalized Mach’s name with the new measure M, the Mach number, to calculate air resistance.27 Ackeret simply had to invert Mach’s formula: the Mach number is v/c.28 In fact, Mach was not the sole author of the number. As the lengthy correspondence between Mach and Salcher reveals, the formula arose out of a spirited exchange of questions, suggestions, and speculations—and it was not Mach himself but Salcher who, in March 1887, finally produced the drawing and the famous formula (figure 4.4), which was then published first in Mach and Salcher’s paper and only later in a study under Salcher’s name alone.29 This winding route is noteworthy given that the Mach/Salcher formula

Figure 4.2: There is little to see in the early sound photographs published by Mach and Salcher in “Photographische Fixirung der durch Projectile in der Luft eingeleiteten Vorgänge,” Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften [Wien]. Mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliche Classe 95, Abt. 2 (1887), figs. 1–6.

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Figure 4.3: Pressure waves in Mach and Salcher’s 1887 experiment. Ernst Mach and Peter Salcher, “Photographische Fixirung der durch Projectile in der Luft eingeleiteten Vorgänge,” Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften [Wien]. Mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliche Classe 95, Abt. 2 (1887), 777 (fig. 7).

is usually regarded as a direct outcome of the two men’s sound photography. Once the formula is known, the projectile’s velocity can be calculated from the angle of the wave cone as documented by the photograph. Yet the dramatic photographs that show the head waves so clearly (figure 4.5) were actually made later, when Ernst Mach and his son Ludwig accepted the invitation of the Prussian arms manufacturer Krupp to work at the company’s shooting range in Meppen, Lower Saxony.30 In his Fiume experiments, Salcher based his conclusions on observation by the naked eye or telescope and on his hand-drawn diagrams; the hazy photographs were no more than illustrations.31 If the early photographs played any epistemic role, it was in their seriality, as Mach was able to reconstruct Salcher’s observations from his faraway office in Vienna by comparing the eighty images.32 For Mach and Salcher, photography was clearly not the “essence and emblem of mechanical objectivity,” to quote a famous definition of scientific photography around 1900,33 but just one representational resource among many. Mach noted as much in his 1888 paper “Remarks on Scientific Applications of Photography,” which urged scientists to exploit the

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whole spectrum of optical research media and always fit their techniques to the particular purpose at hand.34 Mach’s early work on shock waves relied on the sense of vision, whether in instantaneous photography, observation by the telescope, or hand-drawn documentation and diagrams.

Capturing What Is Faster than Vision Especially in his later work, Mach stressed the equal status of visual and auditory observation in the pursuit of knowledge. This view is underlined in a lecture of 1897 that makes full use of visualization, yet also returns to the “sound-wave character” of head waves so controversial in Toepler’s day. As an alternative, Mach proposed the term “noise-wave” (Knallwelle): “Whenever any portion of the headwave strikes the ear it will be heard as a report [Knall]. Appearances point to the conclusion that the projectile

Figure 4.4: Letter from Peter Salcher to Ernst Mach, Fiume (today Rijeka, Croatia), March 11, 1887, page 2 and 3, with a draft of the pressure waves as shown slightly later in their coauthored paper “Photographische Fixirung.” Deutsches Museum München, Archiv, Nachlass Ernst Mach, NL 174/2728–2867, CD_85827.

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Figure 4.5: A clear, sharply focused photograph of a gunshot taken by Ernst Mach on September 12, 1890. Deutsches Museum München, Archiv, Nachlass Ernst Mach, NL 174/3795, CD_52436.

carries this report along with it.”35 Mach recommended very careful listening, because trained ears can perceive both this report, which “advances with the velocity of the projectile and so usually travels at a speed greater than the velocity of sound,” and the report of the exploding powder, which “travels forward with the ordinary velocity of sound. Hence two explosions will be heard, each distinct in time.”36 Here, Mach not only shifted his emphasis from visual to auditory techniques of observation, but also

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provided the first phenomenal description of the “double report,” the Doppelknall—what we know today as a sonic boom. Mach’s plea for ear training in physics echoes Hermann von Helmholtz’s earlier work on tone sensations. Helmholtz famously distinguished between the pure tones of sinusoidal wave forms, “musical tones proper” that consist of a pure prime tone and a series of harmonic upper partial tones, and noise, understood as a non-periodic movement or an irregular mix of musical tones.37 To produce or enhance pure tones, Helmholtz experimented with a great variety of acoustic instruments including sirens, tuning forks, and resonators. These instruments additionally enabled him to decompose musical tones into a series of partial tones. His professed goal, however, was to dispense with such instruments and prove that “the ear alone, unassisted by any peculiar apparatus,” can pick out the individual partials of a musical tone.38 To support his claim, Helmholtz formulated his resonance theory of hearing, comparing the radial fibers of the ear’s basilar membrane with a set of piano strings, each tuned to a particular frequency and thus responsive to the respective partial of a compound auditory stimulus.39 This capacity for pitch discrimination, he argued, is not necessarily present among musically trained people, who are often too habituated to particular instruments and tend to listen to musical signs instead of sounds.40 To counter that tendency, Helmholtz advocated a technique of listening informed by science and driven by a “peculiar power of mental abstraction or a peculiar mastery over attention.”41 Ernst Mach, himself a passionate pianist and organist, became increasingly fascinated with the issue of musical perception during his doctoral and postdoctoral studies in Vienna and Graz, where he met composers and music critics including Franz Liszt, Anton Bruckner, and Eduard Kulke.42 To earn his living, he published several popular papers on music and an introduction to Helmholtz’s theory of music, promoting its use for systematic, instrument-based aural training in music education.43 Later, when developing his theory of the double report by means of careful listening, Mach was inspired by Helmholtz, but opposed his colleague’s clear-cut delineation between the perception of musical tones and noise. Mach argued that the boundary between the two phenomena was fluid. With “sufficient attention, a pitch, though not a very definite one, may be detected in a report even when the latter is produced by an aperiodic motion of the air (the wave of an electric spark, exploding soap-bubbles filled with 2H+0).”44 Formulating his double report theory, Mach attended both to the

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quality of sound and to temporal sequences: “Two explosions will be heard, each distinct in time.”45 Now clearly dissenting from Helmholtz, Mach did not hesitate to equip the ear with mechanical assistance. In his 1897 lecture on projectiles, he explained how the time delay between the sound of the head wave, not easily perceivable, and that of the blast can be ascertained using a mechanical chronograph positioned on the path of flight. The chronograph operates with a wire grid (the vertical black line in figure 4.6) that creates a spark when the head wave hits it, rips, and thereby interrupts the current of an electromagnetic recording device.46 From the delay between the two reports, Mach showed, it is possible to at least roughly calculate both the distance from which the projectile was shot and how fast it is moving (as the difference between the projectile’s velocity and the velocity of sound).47 Mach’s shock-wave studies, in short, were a multisensory and multimedia enterprise; the calculation of flow velocity out of the optical form of head waves and conical waves required keen visual observation, documented in drawings or photographs. His theory of the double boom, likewise, depended on attentive listening and a precise, chronographic measurement of the delay between the two sounds heard. Clearly, the

Figure 4.6: Ernst Mach’s 1897 sketch of experimental setup with a wire grid (connected to a mechanical chronograph) positioned on the path of flight. From Ernst Mach, “On Some Phenomena Attending the Flight of Projectiles” (1897), in Popular Scientific Lectures, 3rd ed., translated by Thomas J. McCormack (Chicago: Open Court, 1898), 332.

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Mach number was not the fruit of abstract numerical games. It resulted from an extensive experimental system, within which Mach eventually managed to integrate both visual and auditory techniques of observation.

The Psychology of Scientific Observation Mach’s work confirmed his own precept that science must build its view of the world not on speculation, but on “observed facts”—and as many of them as possible, for “every newly observed fact completes its worldpicture.”48 This assertion placed Mach’s idea of scientific observation in conflict with Helmholtz’s views. For Helmholtz, there is a fundamental difference between sensations, defined as “impressions on our senses, in so far as we become conscious of them only as conditions of our body,” and perceptions, which merge sensations and imagination and result in a mental image of the observed object.49 Along the same lines, Helmholtz distinguished between the immediate “material ear of the body” (responsible for mere sensations) and the “spiritual ear of the mind” (responsible for concept formation).50 Mach, in contrast, doubted the validity of such a clear-cut distinction. He believed that an individual sensation is never immediate or pure, but always already part of a network of other, past, and present sensations. In this respect, Mach’s epistemology was rooted in his interest in the psychology of association, an important reference point being Adolf Kussmaul. Kussmaul, a psychologist teaching at Strasbourg, was a prominent critic of the attempts to localize cognitive processes in the brain that were so popular in his day (see chapter 2). He accepted that basal brain regions existed but argued that they were highly plastic—constantly modified by practice, aging, or disease. Rather than the rigid schemata of neuroanatomy and their established sensory centers (motor, visual, and acoustic), he proposed a model of dynamic interaction between sensations, whether visual or auditory, and the emergence of what he called sound-images (Lautbilder) and written or script images (Schriftbilder) in the brain.51 A hand-labeled drawing of this model, copied from Kussmaul’s important “Disturbances of Speech,” copied from Kussmaul’s important Die Störungen der Sprache (“Disturbances of Speech,” 1877), is held in Mach’s unpublished papers (figure 4.7).52 Kussmaul’s psychology of associations supports the claims that Mach made slightly earlier in Analyse der Empfindungen (The analysis of sensations, 1886).53 There, Mach traced the route that leads from the sensation, via the unconscious association of sensations, to the formation of conscious ideas.54 Following “the principle of sufficient determination, or sufficient differentiation,” new mental representations adapt to what is

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Figure 4.7: Ernst Mach’s sketch of Kussmaul’s model of neural associations in verbal processing (1896). The diagram illustrates the infinite revision of the mental concept (Begriff) through sensory perception of the object, showing the formation of auditory images of the spoken word (Lautbilder) and visual images of the written word (Schriftbilder). The copy is on a loose page inserted into an 1895–96 lecture manuscript on mechanics based on Mach’s Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung of 1883 (The Science of Mechanics, 1893). The original diagram appears in Kussmaul, “Disturbances of Speech,” 779 (with explanations on 780–81). Deutsches Museum München, Archiv, Nachlass Ernst Mach, NL 174/486, BN26058.

already known.55 Mach’s theory also added two items to Kussmaul’s list of interactions between the classic organs of sensation: the muscular sense and the sense of time. In Analyse der Empfindungen, Mach hinted that these two senses played an important role in his ballistics experiments, alongside vision and audition: “I have been sitting in my room, absorbed in work, while in an adjacent room experiments in explosions were being carried on. It regularly occurred that I shrank back startled, before I heard the report. . . . Now there is nothing absurd in assuming that the acoustic stimulus enters

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simultaneously different nerve-tracks and is met there by the attention in some inverted order, just as, in the case above mentioned, I perceived first the general excitation and afterwards the report of the explosion.”56 In this situation, Mach believed, the muscular sense processed the sensation of the muzzle blast, while the “time-sensation” organized all the other sensations, imposing a temporal order upon them.57 Mach borrowed the notion of muscular sense from the experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt defined it as a kind of “sixth or subjective sense”58 consisting in individuals’ perception of their own muscular contractions—the voluntary movement of the limbs and the involuntary contraction of internal muscles. Experiments on spatial perception had shown Wundt that three-dimensional perception requires not only the sense of vision, but also the action of the ocular musculature; through countless muscular contractions, the eye attunes itself to the three dimensions of space. The muscular sense processes those contractions, thereby generating a sensation of space.59 Mach suspected that hearing must be subject to similar processes. At first, he even conjectured that the musculature of the eardrum adapts to acoustic stimuli by altering its tension, for “what other function would the tensor tympani and the stapedius have if not that of making the ear by turns more sensitive for different tones, of accommodating it?”60 But neither in physiological experiments nor in the anatomical specimen of an ear did it prove possible to find evidence of muscular contractions, and Mach was ultimately forced to abandon his accommodation hypothesis.61 This conclusion did not dent his interest in the interplay between hearing and its associated motor representations. Mach had studied motor-musical perception much earlier in his career, observing that melodies in different keys, or even with different sequences of notes, can nevertheless be experienced as similar if they share the same rhythm and tempo and consequently arouse the same “muscular feelings.”62 He also found that the “tonal constructs of [the same] tonal form” (Tongebilde von gleicher Tongestalt) in a melody derive from tone intervals only, and are independent of tone pitch.63 In Analyse der Empfindungen, Mach gave a musical example: “The overture to Tannhäuser . . . begins with a fourth. If I hear a fourth I at once remark that the tone-sequence might be the beginning of the overture to Tannhäuser, and by this means I recognize the interval.”64 The nonchalance of Mach’s reference to Tannhäuser seems to ignore the debate among music critics on Wagner’s melodic composition, which commenced with the premiere of Tannhäuser on October 19, 1845 at the Königliches Hoftheater in Dresden and continued into the twentieth century.65 For Mach, the overture to Tannhäuser is, rather, the springboard for a broader theory

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of the perception of tonal constructs of the same tonal form. Mach particularly stressed that tonal forms—intervals, rhythms, melodies—exist in a listener’s head only. They arise from the sum of auditory and motor sensations but become independent. This hypothesis would later interest Gestalt psychologists,66 but crucial for the present context is Mach’s further argument that in the sensation of tonal constructs, the sense of hearing and the muscular sense never operate singly. They interrelate unavoidably and in multiple ways, but do not synchronize unaided. Their synchronizer, in the strictest sense of the word, is the “time-sensation.”67 Mach’s explanation of this point evokes Charcot’s bell diagram of the associations between auditory, visual, and motor representations, which has already featured several times in this book. Mach added a further dimension to Charcot’s model: temporal representations. “On hearing a number of strokes of a bell, which are exactly alike acoustically, I discriminate between the first, second, third, and so on,” the reason being that “each is connected for me with a special time-sensation.”68 Even if the listener is thinking of other things and hears the bell’s strokes only unconsciously, he or she can reconstruct their temporal sequence in retrospect: “There arise in my memory distinctly one, two, three, four strokes.”69 It is through time-sensation, argued Mach, that we distinguish an auditory, visual, or tactile memory image (with its associated time-sensation) from a “creation of fancy” (which has no associated time-sensation).70 Temporal sensations thus facilitate the cognition of auditory phenomena, and auditory sensations the cognition of temporal duration. Countering Kant’s view of time-sensation as the product of a pure form of intuition (“inner sense”), Mach also used associationist psychology to argue that the “apprehension of a time measure” derives from the “laws of reproduction series.”71 In this view, time-sensation is based on the temporal sequence of sensory stimuli, which the memory can then reproduce in the same sequence. However, Mach emphasized that the sense of time is not limited to certain types of sensory impressions. Time-sensation, he argued, is generated by all sorts of impressions and by all of our senses.72 Nevertheless, after experimenting on the perception of very small-time differences, he found that time-sensation linked to hearing is much more precise than time-sensation linked to vision or touch.73 Mach, then, appealed for careful listening in physics—be it to analyze the compound structure of musical tones and noise or to perceive the passing of milliseconds. Yet his epistemology of listening departed from Helmholtz’s search for new bodily techniques of “direct observation” and Kant’s idea of an intuitive time-sensation.74 In Mach’s view, the “economy

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of mental presentation” always operates with sets of sensations, which “are alike the starting-point and the goal of all the mental adaptations of the physicist.”75 It is only when different individual sensations begin to associate that different tone qualities can be compared and minimal time intervals identified. Mach found one tertium comparationis of such comparisons in tonal form (Tongestalt), a cognitive form that results and abstracts from the sum of sensory impressions. Despite its equally abstract character, Mach’s tonal form differs from the auditory image as described by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the philosopher Henri Bergson (chapter 3). The auditory images proposed by Saussure and Bergson, too, need to operate in the abstract in order to enable both listening and speaking. However, these scholars surmised that sonic thought was, to a certain extent, independent of visual and motor sensation. They stressed the primacy of the mind in the formation of auditory images, and Bergson argued for the possibility of an intuitive listening to sonic phenomena in their “pure duration.” Mach, too, underlined that the material and the mental ear cannot be separated, but he anchored scientific observation primarily in sensual perception and the inevitable association of sensations, giving equal weight to visual, auditory, muscular, and temporal perception. This principle also explains why Mach’s late shock-wave research applied multisensory observational techniques and did not object to supporting them technologically. He defined additional instruments—telescopes, cameras, electromagnetic chronometers—as auxiliaries that enhance sense-based observations but cannot replace them fully. With his reliance on the senses, Mach’s epistemology stood in stark contrast to Sigmund Exner’s views. But before comparing these two men’s epistemologies in more detail, let us return to Mach’s concepts of sense perception, mental adaption, and “comparative physics.”

Comparative Physics and the Relativity of Sound In Analyse der Empfindungen, Mach argued that scientific knowledge always obeys the principle of “purposive thought-adaptation”: new impressions are calibrated against knowledge that has been acquired, passed on within particular disciplines or cultural environments, or inherited.76 This argument anticipates the figure of mental adaptation that Mach would present in the lecture mentioned at the start of this chapter, “On the Principle of Comparison in Physics.” There, he wrote that the human mind is always ready “to put forward for comparison known facts which resemble the new event, or agree with it in certain features.”77 As such, comparison is “the most powerful inner vital element of science” and the

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notion of “comparative physics” should be just as current as “comparative anatomy.”78 Even the most abstract investigation of nature is bound to rely upon analogies and concepts that arise from experience. In physics, Mach continued, a particularly important object of comparison is sound. The analogy between sound and light waves has been fruitful in the history of physics, if occasionally misleading. The comparisons drawn by the natural philosopher Christiaan Huygens between light and sound, for example, “demonstrably impeded” the discovery of light’s periodicity.79 Mach’s own shock-wave research went beyond such analogies, however. His objects of comparison were not ideas of sound or sound waves as such, but specific auditory phenomena: reports. Thus, when Mach calculated the distance of a blast and the velocity of the projectile by comparing two reports, the juxtaposition of sensory (in this case acoustic) facts lead him to a relativist theory of velocity—that is, velocities cannot be represented on their own account, but only in dependency on the constitution of the medium in which they move and in relation to other velocities in the same medium. This habit of thinking in relationships means that Mach seemed, at least briefly, to prefigure the general theory of relativity. Albert Einstein himself wrote in a now-famous obituary that because Mach “clearly recognized the weak points of classical mechanics,” he had been close to “calling for a general theory of relativity, and that almost half a century ago!”80 Certainly, in Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung of 1883 (The Science of Mechanics, 1893), Mach did attack Newton’s view of absolute space, absolute time, and absolute (kinematic) motion as “pure things of thought” destined to remain unproved.81 He preferred to keep to knowledge gained from experience. For Mach, philosophical speculation is possible only on the basis of incomplete experiences, and permissible only when complexity needs to be reduced.82 From this point of departure, he came to conclude that there are no absolute magnitudes, ones that would be meaningful outside of the interrelationships of bodies.83 All the phenomena of Earth and the universe are relative; they are organized in dynamic systems of mutual influence, of which all forces—centrifugal and gravitational forces, the forces of acceleration and inertia—are necessarily a product. Masses, weights, and velocities do not exist as such, but only in the reciprocal relationships between all bodies.84 The same applies to space, time, and motion, which can only be thought of in terms of “the interdependence of things on one another.”85 Even in his early work, Mach grounded his principle of relativity in human beings’ sense-dependent capacity for mental adaption, and in the interdependence of phenomena as experienced through the senses from

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a standpoint on Earth.86 This perspective explains why Mach inserted his copy of Kussmaul’s associationist model into an 1895−96 lecture manuscript on mechanics based on his own Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung.87 If we pursue Kussmaul’s schema in the context of Mach’s own interests, it emerges that even highly abstract cognitive concepts such as space and time are dependent on visual and auditory experiences and their neural processing via the temporal sense and the sense of space. For mental representations of time and space arise from “sets of sensations” (Empfindungsreihen),88 themselves associated with mental representations of color, sound, smell, taste, and motion. Indeed, Mach had no hesitation in testing Newton’s views with a seemingly banal experiment on the sense of balance and orientation. Blindfolded and seated in a large mobile frame that rotated about different axes, Mach observed that he could, after a certain delay, perceive changes in direction without any visual point of reference. These experiments showed that the inner ear, or more specifically the comparative sensation of the three semicircular canals of the bony labyrinth, is also responsible for the sense of balance and more generally for the sense of spatial orientation.89 But Mach also took the opportunity to comment on Newton’s concepts of time and space, now with a more caustic tone: “Had Newton . . . ever observed how we may actually imagine our selves turned and displaced in space without the assistance of stationary bodies as points of reference, he would certainly have been confirmed more than ever in his unfortunate speculations regarding absolute space.”90 For Mach, in contrast, it is associations between different sensations, even without a stationary reference point, that make ideas of space possible at all. Accordingly, Mach’s studies in physics always address very concrete time- and space-based phenomena—the speed of the sound of a projectile’s blast, for example, which is relational because it changes along with the forces of gravity and the thermal conditions of the air-filled space. Consequently, the speed of the projectile’s head wave may move faster than the blast in the same air-filled space, but still relates to the same conditions. The speeds of these sounds cannot be expressed or represented absolutely, but only as dependent on their medium and comparatively, in relation to one another. It is the physicist’s task to interrelate the two phenomena by way of mental adaption or, more concretely, comparative listening. Einstein presented Mach’s work in a very different light. In his hands, Mach’s notion of relativity, firmly embedded in experience (and sometimes called “relativity of bodies”91), is adapted to a realist and hypothetical science.92 When Einstein developed his first gravitational field theory

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in 1913, he cited Mach, but summarily reformulated Mach’s notion of space to propose that no “physical property” whatsoever can be ascribed to space; there are only gravitational fields that govern processes in time and space, including “the propagation of light rays and the behavior of measures and clocks.”93 Einstein described the theory of the interaction of bodies as “Mach’s principle,”94 finding it compatible with both the equivalence principle (the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass) and the principle of relativity (the universality of physical laws in different frames of time). Only later, when Einstein fully exchanged the primacy of bodies for the primacy of an expanding universe, did he forsake Mach’s principle and his critique of speculative scientific thought more generally.95 Mach’s letters to Einstein have not survived, and Mach never commented publicly on the theory of relativity. Some historians of science have nonetheless tried to identify at least “thematic” or “programmatic” connections between Mach and Einstein;96 others argue that Mach’s inadequate mathematical knowledge explains his reticence on the point.97 Yet others regard Einstein’s theory of relativity as a “third way” between electrodynamic field theory and Mach’s antimechanistic mechanics.98 Influenced by Mach, in this view, Einstein complemented his own mathematical and physical hypotheses with a particular, if constantly changing, philosophical worldview. Both Mach and Einstein thus stood for a “culture of scientific mediation” that bridged the diverging cultures of science and philosophy.99 Strictly speaking, though, Mach’s “two-cultures” dilemma differed considerably from Einstein’s. Whereas Einstein sought to unite physical with metaphysical hypotheses, Mach wished to explain scientific, factual knowledge by means of experience. As a physicist, Mach deliberately pursued an associationist epistemology by making sensory observation the foundation and touchstone of all his experiments and of the resulting, always changing “world-picture.”100 This is why Mach thought not with abstract, mathematical formulae, but with a net of sensations.

Comparative Listening Becomes a Method Mach regarded the human ear as a crucial organ of knowledge in a very broad sense. “A rather one-sided view of the sensations of tone would be obtained,” he warned in Analyse der Empfindungen, “if we were to consider only the province of speech and music.”101 Accordingly, Mach applied the question of tone sensation—or more precisely, the method of comparative listening—to a huge range of different fields. In addition to his shock-wave research, Mach’s studies on the Doppler effect (Christian Doppler’s theory of the modification of sound-wave fre-

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quency in moving phenomena as perceived by a distant observer) also used these methods. Building on Doppler’s work, Mach examined the changes in “tone color” in moving phenomena and found that if the sound source is very close and loud, the lower part of the frequency spectrum dominates; when the sound source moves further away, it becomes fainter and the upper partials become more audible.102 Mach’s interest in the relationship of sound and space also led him to propose the first theory of binaural sound localization. Through experiments comparing the auditory sensations (intensity and tone color) of the left and right ear, he became the first to calculate interaural time difference.103 Mach’s studies on localization were later confirmed by Berlin psychologists Erich von Hornbostel and Max Wertheimer, inventors of a “device for determining the direction of sound” during the First World War and regarded today as pioneers in the field of sound source localization.104 However remarkable from an epistemological point of view, Mach’s technique of comparative listening clearly served more practical, even baleful, purposes as well. His work on the “double report,” the Doppler effect, and binaural sound localization remain foundational in ballistics, aeronautics, arms manufacturing, and warfare. Indeed, Mach and Salcher’s very first publication on ballistic photography highlights the intended practical applications, and closes with a lengthy section thanking the military and arms manufacturers for their support.105 Mach later insisted that the ballistics experiments had been undertaken “not for advancing the ends of war, but for promoting the ends of science.”106 From a present-day standpoint, this claim is no more convincing than his maxim that “one cannot wage war with photographed projectiles.”107 The comparative listening method did, nevertheless, find more peaceable applications. It is little known, for example, that Mach also worked as an acoustics consultant for the Rudolfinum on Rejdiště (now Jan Palach Square) in Prague, originally a combined concert auditorium and art gallery and today home to the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra.108 He studied the Rudolfinum building, designed by Josef Zítek and Josef Schulz, soon after its completion in 1884. The construction committee had identified flaws in the auditorium’s acoustics and approached Mach for help. Mach, still teaching in Prague at the time, doubted that the Rudolfinum’s acoustics could be improved retrospectively to any great extent. Good concert halls, he told the committee, are usually built “in the form of a tube” and enable reflected and direct sound to arrive simultaneously, but the Rudolfinum’s auditorium was square with bare side walls in the parterre. The only way to remedy the disturbances would be to drape the highly reflective wall surfaces with fabric.109

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Figure 4.8: Ernst Mach’s 1885 drawing of the Musikverein’s Great Hall, Vienna, produced in preparation of his acoustic consultancy for the Rudolfinum in Prague. Deutsches Museum München, Archiv, Nachlass Ernst Mach, NL 174/4123–3.

During his preparations, Mach realized that architectural acoustics was in its infancy and still in search of appropriate research methods. Mach worked from both visual and auditory observations. He made his own drawings of the Rudolfinum’s auditorium as an aid to calculating sound propagation and reflection, and compared them with the plans of his era’s most prestigious concert halls, including the Gewandhaus in Leipzig and Palais Ehrbar and the Musikverein’s great hall in Vienna (figure 4.8).110 Mach also carried out “musical trials” to evaluate the “appalling noise” that plagued the Rudolfinum more accurately.111 In one such experiment, he placed a small friction machine, like the one used in his physics laboratory, on the stage.112 The machine generated “4, 5, 6 loudly rattling little Leyden-jar sparks” every second, in time with a metronome, while Mach walked around the auditorium. In the stalls and the dress-circle boxes, he observed echo effects at intervals of one-twelfth to one-fifth of a second between the spark sounds, whereas on the rostrum they coincided with the direct sound. By comparing the time intervals (that is, the path lengths), Mach was able to discover which of the reflecting walls were causing echo effects.113 Once again, Mach’s findings relied on comparisons between auditory sensations that he had collected experimentally. As in his studies of shock waves and head waves, the Doppler effect, and spatial and directional hear-

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ing, Mach here exploited the full arsenal of research apparatus available to him as the head of a physics laboratory—but importantly, he declared the fulcrum and fundament of knowledge to be the comparison of sensory data obtained by and through the physicist’s body. Mach’s comparative listening was a knowledge technique that enabled him to reach a new understanding of the world around him and, beyond that, to make it sound different.

A Physiologist as Acoustic Consultant Ernst Mach was among several scientists of his day whose services were sought for the acoustic design of concert halls, theaters, and lecture halls despite their lack of detailed expertise. Another was the Viennese physiologist Sigmund Exner. As we have seen, Exner had an ambivalent relationship with Mach—and indeed, the epistemological positions that prompted the two scientists to engage in architectural acoustics and other application-oriented projects could hardly have been more different. Exner’s interest in architectural acoustics arose in 1904, when the architect Gottlieb Jaroschka designed a new lecture hall for Exner’s physiology department at the University of Vienna. At this time, the rate of lecturehall construction throughout Europe was rising fast under the pressure of newly founded and expanding universities; higher student numbers called for new auditorium designs that would make each word spoken at the lectern audible to a large audience. The auditorium in the physiology department, on Währinger Strasse, soon gained fame for its acoustic quality and became a model for lecture-hall design across Europe.114 Seating approximately three hundred students, it was designed in a semicircular shape with ascending tiers and a gallery above the back tiers. This arrangement enabled the greatest number of listeners to sit close to the lecture podium in a limited space, thus shortening the paths of reflected sound. To further reduce reverberation, Jaroschka designed a slightly sloped ceiling and sloping side walls at the back of the auditorium. Exner followed the construction work closely, and published his observations in 1905 in an essay entitled “Über die Akustik von Hörsälen und ein Instrument, sie zu bestimmen” (On the acoustics of lecture halls and an instrument to determine them).115 Exner, an important figure in the history of physiology, justified his venture into the field of architectural acoustics as that of a layman, citing the poor acoustics of many existing auditoriums and noting (as Mach had before him) that the state of knowledge in the field was disappointing.116 To guarantee good seeing and hearing in the new lecture halls of his time, Exner made two proposals. Lecture-hall

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design, he argued, should draw on empirical studies in the recently established field of architectural acoustics, and—more importantly—it should counterpose the insights gained from experience with new research on auditory perception.117 As we will see, both of these suggestions not only attest to Exner’s deep engagement with lecture-hall design, but also reveal a view of “aural objectivity” in the sciences that differs greatly from Ernst Mach’s listening-based scientific inquiries. What the two scientists had in common, though, was that both drew inspiration from their work in applied acoustics to reflect upon larger epistemological issues.

Rethinking Reverberation Exner’s 1905 treatise on architectural acoustics includes several drawings of the new auditorium built for his physiology department. The lines indicated in these drawings are reminiscent of numerous nineteenth-century treatises, especially in the field of theater design, in which architects attempted to predict the reverberation time of particular arrangements, applying the notion of “rays” of sound and laws of reflection borrowed from optics.118 These diagrams enabled the behavior of sound in different auditoriums to be simulated graphically, and Exner followed their example in his essay (figures 4.9a and 4.9b).119 Even in the early nineteenth century, however, some architects found the optical analogy to be unsatisfactory in practice. They began responding to new definitions of sound proposed by physicists—as a mediumdependent periodic fluctuation in pressure—and conducted their own experiments on the behavior of sound in enclosed spaces. Architects now went beyond paths of reflection and attended to the force and duration of reverberation. Their studies also show an awareness that reverberation is dependent on the volume and building materials of an auditorium.120 This shift in the concept of reverberation paved the way for the American physicist Wallace Clement Sabine to develop his now famous definition of reverberation time, the time required for a reverberant sound in a room to decrease to inaudibility.121 To calculate reverberation time, Sabine proposed the equation RT60 ≈ (0.161 · V) / A, V being room volume in m3 and A, the equivalent absorption surface in m2. The innovative aspect of this formula is that it is no longer concerned with the form of a building—the age-old question of whether round, elliptical, or rectangular plans are best suited for auditoriums—but rather with the volume V and absorption A of the construction materials (such as wood, glass, and

Figures 4.9a and 4.9b: Sketches of the auditorium of the University of Vienna physiology department. From Sigmund Exner, “Über die Akustik von Hörsälen und ein Instrument, sie zu bestimmen,” Zeitschrift des Österreichischen Ingenieur- und Architekten-Vereines 57, no. 10 (1905), 144 and 145.

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brick). Reverberation is thus tied to a building’s capacity to reflect, absorb, and transform energy.122 In 1905, five years after the publication of Sabine’s formula, Exner gave credit to his American colleague’s achievements. Thanks to Sabine, he wrote, the acoustics of rooms could now be calculated in advance, at least approximately.123 It was still, however, almost impossible to make reliable and generally valid judgments about existing auditoriums, as perceptions of a sound’s loudness and duration were subjective. Sabine himself measured the time required for different sound frequencies to decay to inaudibility in an auditorium by using a technical setup consisting of an organ pipe and a chronograph. The chronograph was connected via electric currents to the electropneumatic valve of the organ pipe’s air tank and to a switch in the experimenter’s hand. The experimenter could register the interval between the moment when the organ pipe’s air supply was cut off and the moment when he was no longer able to hear the residual sound in the room.124 Exner criticized Sabine’s setup for ignoring the fact that the experimenters’ auditory attention is diffuse, varies from one individual to the next, and decreases over time.125 Even a trained listener, he believed, cannot compare and precisely determine the acoustic quality of auditoriums by ear alone—the reverberation of a room can only be measured objectively by taking into account the difficulty of hearing reverberation with the naked human ear.126 No doubt Exner would have found fault with Ernst Mach’s earlier research on the acoustics of the Rudolfinum on the same grounds. Mach used a friction machine to generate sound impulses and a chronometer to measure intervals between the impulse and the resulting echoes, but he, too, relied on his own hearing to identify the relevant effects. Countering these physicists’ notion of the objective measurement of reverberation, which still placed the human ear’s judgment on par with the chronograph, Exner opted for a more radical measuring technique— one that sent the experimenter right out of the room. His alternative to Sabine’s devices was the “acoustometer.” The purpose of this apparatus, a precursor of modern sound-level meters, was to provide a more faithful measure of both the duration and strength of reverberation in auditoriums. Its schematic plan, shown in figure 4.10a, differs significantly from Sabine’s experimental setup. In this setting, the experimenter does not hear the initial pistol shot in the auditorium, concentrating instead on the reverberation communicated through the telephone line. Exner explained the need for this innovation physiologically: it ensued from the unreliability of human attention, especially in comparative listening to more than one auditory event at once. In

Figures 4.10a and 4.10b: Photograph and schematic plan of Exner’s acoustometer, designed in 1905. In Exner’s experimental setup, two electrical wires connect the auditorium (left) with an adjoining room (right), in which the experimenter is stationed. Using the first wire, the experimenter triggers a pistol shot in the auditorium by means of an electromagnetic fastener and a percussion cap. The second wire, basically a telephone line, enables the remote operator to hear the reverberation in the auditorium but not the initial shot, the intensity of which would otherwise dull his auditory perception. By regulating the resistance of the second wire, the experimenter can determine the reverberation’s precise duration and strength. Finally, the strength of the reverberation is measured at various time intervals, allowing comparisons to be made between different auditoriums. From Sigmund Exner, “Über die Akustik von Hörsälen und ein Instrument, sie zu bestimmen,” Zeitschrift des Österreichischen Ingenieur- und Architekten-Vereines 57, no. 10 (1905), 147.

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this sense, Exner’s acoustometer design is not only deeply embedded in a discourse on reverberation initiated by architects and physicists at the turn of the twentieth century but also links his interest in mechanical objectivity in the sciences to his psychophysiological work on aural subjectivity.

Aural Subjectivity As a physiologist, Exner was interested in the human power of auditory perception—hearing and the cognitive processing of noises, sounds, words, notes, and melodies. It is from this perspective that the final part of “Über die Akustik von Hörsälen” asks why “in many auditoriums it is possible to measure reverberations of a second or more, and yet most audience members do not notice any reverberation at all.”127 To answer that question, Exner likened the concept of reverberation as defined in physics to several concepts much discussed in the physiology of his day: reaction time, auditory afterimages, and auditory memory. Reaction time was one of Exner’s earliest objects of scientific inquiry. A former student of Hermann von Helmholtz, Exner in 1873 revisited his mentor’s insights into the influence of temperature fluctuation on the reaction time of motor nerves.128 Aiming to compare the reaction time of different senses, he constructed the “neuramoebimeter,” an instrument to test the reaction times of sight, hearing, and touch.129 Through experiments with numerous test subjects in his laboratory and at the lunatic asylum in Doebling, near Vienna, Exner found significant differences in the reaction times of the various sense organs, auditory reaction time being somewhere between motor and visual reaction time. Even more influential, however, were external circumstances (temperature, tiredness, drug consumption), and, most of all, individual capacities (training, talent, age).130 Even at this early stage, Exner considered the human sense of time to be highly subjective. Thirty years later, when Exner became interested in lecture-hall acoustics and the failure of many audience members to notice reverberation, he realized that reaction time, though relevant, does not fully account for the phenomenon. Exner explained in his essay that listeners do not even consciously perceive reverberation as such because they concentrate entirely on the semantic content of the presentation. This is a physiologically useful process: “Over the course of our lives we have grown accustomed to suppressing our awareness of all sensory impressions that are meaningless or even harmful to us in practice.” Similar techniques of suppression are at work in the observer’s reaction to afterimages left on the retina:131 “In all such cases we say we can see this or that object only indistinctly, but do not

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notice that the object is occluded by afterimages, circles of confusion, and retinal vessels, just as we do not notice that a speaker’s words disappear in the reverberation of the ones that went before them.”132 These remarks refer to Exner’s previous work on afterimages in color perception, which investigated the duration of afterimages caused by the intermittent stimulation of the retina and showed that the clarity of the image decreases exponentially over time.133 In his 1905 paper on acoustics, Exner noted that human sensory perception experiences not only visual afterimages but also auditory afterimages.134 The first to examine these was another Viennese scholar, otologist Victor Urbantschitsch. In 1881, Urbantschitsch reported on experiments showing that auditory afterimages varied among different test subjects. For some subjects, the afterimage’s pitch and frequency differed from that of the original stimulus, others ignored the afterimages completely, and a few were even able to perceive afterimages caused by sounds below the threshold of audibility.135 Epistemologically, it is significant that physiologists such as Urbantschitsch and Exner started to investigate auditory afterimages—the gradual fading of auditory impressions in the human brain—at a time when physics was becoming able to calculate reverberation, the continuous loss of sound energy, in an auditorium. For Exner, the two phenomena were indeed related. He seems, at least, to have had that in mind when arguing that the perception of reverberation in an auditorium both depends on a subject’s reaction time and interferes with the perception of auditory afterimages in the brain, the result being a deafness to both phenomena.136 Exner’s essay also addresses another physiological deficiency: the fallibility of memory. Listeners cannot either judge the acoustic quality of a single auditorium or compare the reverberation times of different auditoriums by ear alone, he argued, since they rely on memories that fade or change over time.137 This comment on the diminution and unreliability of the auditory memory points to the field of auditory neuroscience, still young and controversial at the time. The auditory cortex was discovered in the second half of the nineteenth century by one of Exner’s colleagues, Viennese neuroanatomist Theodor Meynert. As we saw in chapters 2 and 3, Meynert’s discovery was taken up by scholars from a range of disciplines in the years that followed, and physiologist Exner, too, stepped into this debate on the nature of auditory cognitive processes. After medical studies in Heidelberg and Vienna, Exner worked as an assistant in Ernst von Brücke’s physiology laboratory, and in 1890 he succeeded Brücke as professor of physiology at the University of Vienna. It was here that Exner first observed aphasic hospital patients and experimented with the electric stimulation of the cortex of deceased patients

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to localize individual mnemonic abilities, in search of the areas where visual and auditory impressions, for example, are stored in the brain.138 In this work, Exner compared the brain to a “central telegraph station,”139 stressing, though, that the station is not just a central office where all the telegraphic wires from the outside world converge: it also accommodates a seemingly infinite number of smaller offices where messages are processed in ever different ways. In Exner’s view, the extended metaphor aptly portrays the relationship between the “absolute cortical field” (mainly responsible for certain cognitive functions) and adjacent “relative cortical fields”—a relationship that physiologists could in principle examine in every detail, though in practice they might be defeated by the sheer degree of its complexity. What is more, and most important in the present context, Exner found that this myriad of cognitive processes operates largely unconsciously and beyond human control. An even more dynamic notion of human cognition, finally, is found in Exner’s Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklärung der psychischen Erscheinungen of 1894.140 There, Exner attributed all human ideas, memories, and states of consciousness to neurophysiological processes. He sketched a complex network of discretely organized nerve cells and fibers, neural paths, and connections that is in part inherited and in part molded, strengthened, and modified by experience and learning.141 Exner stressed the ever-changing structure of the cortex and the plasticity of both cerebral pathways (Bahnungen) and inhibitions (Hemmungen).142 Sensory memory images are stored in the cortex in ways that are provisional and individually unique. These internal images do not correspond directly to a depiction of the outside world but are formed in a process of free association. Combining with other memory images, they develop a life of their own and impact every act of sensation, perception, and recognition.143 At a time when idealist philosophers were defending the human subject’s freedom of thought, Exner thus saw nothing but an infinite chain of neural causes and effects. “These thought processes proceed in us without our will; indeed, they may proceed against our will,” he warned.144 Exner, in other words, opposed the notion of an immaterial human memory and will as outlined most famously by Henri Bergson (chapter 3), aligning himself instead with colleagues such as Sigmund Freud (chapter 2) and Ernst Mach. Mach and Freud continued to search for the location of different memory faculties, though both—albeit from differing perspectives— were more interested in the dynamic, largely uncontrollable evolution of individual associations in the human brain. But whereas Mach and Freud saw the uncontrollable influence of images in the memory as an inevitable

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fact and framed their epistemological theories and working methods accordingly, Exner sought ways to rectify the deficiencies of the memory. Exner’s insight into the constraints of human auditory cognition casts a different light on his use of the acoustometer just a few years later. The acoustometer was a means to circumvent retarded auditory reaction, deafening auditory afterimages, and uncontrollable aesthetic associations more generally. It enabled the user to replace capricious human cognitive processes—what Exner described as the output of a vast, self-operating telegraph office—with an actual and more reliable telephone circuit. Unlike the human experimenter, Exner’s invention could produce trustworthy numbers. Exner’s acoustometer brought his critique of Sabine’s studies on reverberation full circle. The physicist Sabine relied on his own auditory perception; he stayed close to nineteenth-century musical and theatrical culture, with its subjective listening practices, where reverberation research had originated. The physiologist Exner, in contrast, ultimately put his faith in the exclusively physical character of data produced, beyond the threshold of perception, with the aid of the acoustometer. Exner evidently recognized his departure from unmediated techniques of observation when he concluded that “it is not irrelevant whether we listen directly or through the telephone.”145

Databases as Tools of Auditory Comparison Exner’s acoustometer combined his research on auditory perception and reverberation in auditoriums, closing an epistemic circuit that connected the physics of room acoustics with the psychophysiology of the senses. Exner took an ambitious view of his invention’s potential. He suggested that it could be used to measure the strength and duration of reverberation in different auditoriums throughout Europe, deploying the same device in different parts of the auditorium and with different time intervals.146 Armed with these measurements, he planned to establish a database enabling the comparison of what human subjects were incapable of comparing unaided. For Exner, the database as a tool was the epitome of objectivity in research. He praised its constancy and tractability with a playful quote from Goethe’s Faust: “What we possess in black and white, / We can in peace and comfort bear away.”147 Exner’s idea of a database for architectural acoustics remained unrealized during his lifetime. But his advocacy of the acoustometer and a database that would collect all its measurements is paralleled by yet another

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activity—his involvement in founding the world’s first scientific archive of phonograph recordings. In 1899, the Royal Academy of the Sciences in Vienna appointed a committee, headed by Exner, to discuss scientific uses of the phonograph. Its debates resulted in the establishment of the Phonogram Archive in Vienna, initially housed in the University of Vienna’s physiology department, of which Exner was the director. The need for such an archive had been urged by Exner himself, speaking less for his own discipline than for anthropologists, who complained that they could develop only “inadequate terminology” for the languages and musics of foreign peoples, having to describe their observations within the limiting framework of their own knowledge, subjective perceptions, and memories.148 A sound recording, by contrast, would provide a reliable source that could be played back repeatedly and minutely dissected and analyzed. Sound recording, stated the archive’s founding document, might finally give science an objective means “to preserve the events of the present for posterity.”149 The institution’s goal was nothing less than to replace individual memories with an objective collection of all the languages and musics of the world. Only then, equipped with a rich database of sounds, would it be possible to listen to and compare sonic data scientifically. The Phonogram Archive in Vienna soon became a model for other archives founded worldwide, facilitating new modes of sound-based research (see chapters 3 and 6). Of special interest here is Exner’s insistence on the need for technological equipment, in this case phonography, capable of supplementing the human scholar’s unreliable ear. In fact, the archive remained empty in the early days of Exner’s directorship in order to focus on enhancing the storage capacities of phonography. From 1899 to 1901, the archivists worked on designs for an “Archiv-Phonograph” device that would record not on cylinders but on discs, much like a gramophone. Only in 1903, after the archival technology had been built, carefully tested, and optimized with a special eye to the needs of traveling researchers, did the archival work officially begin.150 During its early phase, the Phonogram Archive also produced a collection of “voice portraits” of celebrities including illustrious Viennese politicians, scientists, writers, actors, and singers. Among the latter were mezzo-soprano Rosa Papier-Paumgartner and soprano Berta Foersterová, both members of the Vienna Hofoper and successful Wagnerians.151 We can only speculate as to whether the initiative to preserve these operatic voices was, once again, motivated by Exner’s lack of trust in the purity of human auditory memory.152 At any rate, his Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklärung der psychischen Erscheinungen highlights the subjective character of past experience. To illustrate the mutual, often uncontrollable

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influence of images in the memory, Exner described a visit to the opera where the hearing of an experienced operagoer conjures up an entire ensemble of existing memory images: When [Wagner’s] leitmotif sounds, the entire idea of the heroic character in question is awakened; even before the character appears on the stage, the cortical pathways that belong to the idea of the character’s face are evoked by association, as is everything that belongs to the memory images of the character’s earlier actions, so that now when the corresponding visual cortical pathways are stimulated, a more intense, more characteristic, and richer process of overall stimuli takes place than would have happened if the character had appeared before the viewer unprepared.153

Such aesthetic associations, Exner added, generally operate “without us exerting any voluntary influence on their course.”154 Whereas his colleague Ernst Mach was fascinated by the multilayered “tonal gestalt” that take shape in a listener’s mind almost involuntarily and considered it impossible to separate auditory, visual, and motor imagery, Exner believed he could find a way to suppress these workings of the imagination. The phonograph might serve that purpose, as it did not risk becoming tangled up in a net of associations when Wagner’s leitmotif first rang out. Unlike the multisensory setting of the stage, phonographic recordings could present singing voices as seemingly raw and pure data. The physiologist Exner did not content himself with fatalistically describing the ineradicable subjectivity of human perception and judgment. Instead, he stepped into the role of a physicist and helped to develop automated or semi-automated devices—such as the acoustometer and the Archiv-Phonograph—capable of offsetting the deficiencies of subjective perception. Historians of science have shown that insights into perceptual subjectivity and mechanical objectivity arose in tandem around 1900, facilitating an array of visual and imaging techniques.155 Exner contributed his search for technologies and techniques of aural objectivity to that process.

Rhetorics of Application Exner came from a large, bourgeois family of scientists in the Habsburg Monarchy who paired liberalism with technology-based empiricism, archive-based statistics, and probabilistic reasoning. They all left their laboratories to carry out applied research in the most objective manner possible, whether in school reform (philosopher Franz Serafin Exner Sr.,

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Sigmund’s father), methods of observation in meteorological optics (physicist Karl Exner, Sigmund’s brother), detection of radioactivity in uranium mines (chemist and physicist Franz Serafin Exner Jr., another brother), or statistics-based models of weather forecasting (meteorologist Felix Exner, Sigmund’s son). Admittedly, Sigmund Exner found it considerably more important to outline the possibilities of objective research in principle than to apply them in practice.156 This may explain why he spent less time using the acoustometer and the Archiv-Phonograph than writing about their potential as instruments of research. Nevertheless, Exner’s interest in the issue of application is noteworthy in this context because of a further connection with Ernst Mach. Mach’s technique of comparative listening, too, emerged from fields of applied research. Mach was well aware of the significance of his investigations for a wide range of military and civil uses. Raised with music and inspired by the works of Liszt, Bruckner, and Wagner, he dedicated much of his writing to musical acoustics; like Exner, he occasionally served as a consultant in architectural acoustics. Rhetorically, however, Mach presented himself as a representative of pure research, or as a scholar whose theoretical findings may eventually be applied by others. Whether or not Exner’s and Mach’s self-portraits were realistic, their rhetoric surely permitted them to pursue their own epistemological interests while still attracting a broad audience and financial support. The rhetoric of applicability should also be viewed in the context of a turn to precision, the subject of heated debate in the modern sciences. In many disciplines, measuring instruments claiming to guarantee scientific exactitude through numerical values started to appear around 1800, and most of these instruments were either developed or immediately applied outside the academic realm. Acoustics was no exception to that trend. In the nineteenth century, physicists, instrument makers, and musicians contributed to the definition of standard values for sound phenomena such as musical pitch and tempo with the aid of metronomes, sirens, and tuning forks.157 Simultaneously, the same instruments were used to test, measure, and redefine human hearing. The omnipresence of measuring instruments led the physicist and physician Hermann von Helmholtz to advocate a new understanding of the ear as a precision instrument. For the analysis of noise, simple tones, and musical tones, argued Helmholtz, acoustic instruments are helpful in the first instance, but for the long term he advocated “attentive aural observation without artificial assistance.”158 Mach and Exner, by contrast, agreed that the sciences (and applied research in particular) should never rely on the unaided ear and must seek technological ways to guarantee the greatest precision.

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As we have seen, Mach made use of large numbers of precision instruments for his acoustic research—but only as an aid to better seeing and hearing. He believed that because what we know about the physical world is nothing more than a composite of sensations, there is no point in any radical, mechanical substitution of sensual perception. “Colors, sounds, spaces, times,” wrote this empiricist, “are provisionally the ultimate elements, whose given connexion it is our business to investigate. It is precisely in this that the exploration of reality consists.”159 For Mach, there is no reality and no objectivity beyond sensual perception, so sensual perception remained the point of reference in his work as a physicist. He also stressed, however, that there is no such thing as pure sense perception because sensation is governed by the principle of “purposive thought-adaptation.” This sense-based epistemology prompted him to call for a new liaison between physics and psychology, with acoustics as an ideal bridge discipline between the two. Mach took the newly emerging field of acoustics as inspiration for a technique of comparative listening that he considered to be important for basic research as much as for various fields of applied physics. Exner, instead, doubted the usefulness of careful listening in the sciences. His devotion to precision instruments was driven by a fundamental critique of sensory judgment. In Exner’s view, the sense of hearing and processes of auditory cognition are equally unreliable. To emphasize this point, Exner literally sent the human scholar out of the room and engaged in the design of measuring and recording devices. Even in fields of applied research, he preferred to let machines think with sound. Exner’s motivation for inventing his telephonic device (the acoustometer), deploying the Archiv-Phonograph as a scientific tool, and promoting the use of databases and archives grew from his work as a physiologist. It was through physiology that he had come to see subjectivity in human auditory perception, attention, and memory that demanded radical compensation—through mechanical devices and the associated practices of measuring, comparing, and archiving—in order to achieve scientific objectivity. Although Exner barely mentioned Mach in his own writings, Exner ranked high among the authors read and collected by Mach.160 Indeed, Mach seems to have been initially inspired to enter the field of physiology by Exner’s work. Exner features in Mach’s 1897 deliberations on the sense of orientation, made “before I had any great acquaintance with physiology and while pursuing unbiasedly my natural thoughts.”161 Later, though, in the fifth edition of Analyse der Empfindungen (published in 1906), Mach took offense at Exner’s overly abstract epistemology and his rhetoric of

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possibilities and probabilities. He attacked the physiologist for his quantitative investigation of brain stimulation and his general focus on the sheer complexity of the human brain’s perceptive system. “I cannot conceive,” remarked Mach, “how the qualitative variety of sensations can arise from the variation of the connexions and from mere quantitative differences.”162 Mach saw no virtue in psychologists stating that they could, in principle, quantify and trace the many processes of sensation and cognition. Nor was he interested in proving that most of these processes operate on the level of the unconscious, beyond human control. Although he seems to have agreed with most of Exner’s neurophysiological findings, Mach considered human sensation impossible to circumvent—to be an epistemic quantity of its own. The daily business of the physicist must therefore always remain rooted in “unbiased” reliance on human sensation. It is certainly speculation, but perhaps Exner foresaw that very critique of his work when he invited Mach to the Meeting of German Naturalists and Physicians in 1894. It is perfectly possible that he expected Mach to present his idea of a “comparative physics” with its unrestricted reliance on sense perception and thought-adaptation in scientific observation. In the end, Exner might have even preferred to write “Topic Withheld” on the program instead of giving a platform to Mach’s call to trust the senses, think with sound, and reshape the sonic environment.

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Aural Attention M u s c l e F e e l i ng s a n d t h e Qu e s t for Au t hor i t y i n t h e A r t s

Neuroanatomists’ discovery of the brain’s auditory cortex in the 1860s brought about a flush of new research in a wide range of disciplines, all concerned with different modes of “thinking with sound.” Yet, as previous chapters of this book have shown, auditory cognition remained a moving target. Postmortem examination of the human brain, observation of patients suffering from aphasia, and self-observation by scientists revealed only a little at a time, and repeated attempts to compare the workings of the auditory memory with the capturing of sound by the newly invented phonograph came to nothing. For this very reason, a wealth of theories about whether and how humans think with sound coexisted in the late nineteenth century. Against this backdrop and with the advent of new studies on auditory and motor interaction, physiologists realized that human cognitive processes were not restricted to the brain; rather, they seemed to involve the body as a whole system. Research on “inner speech” in particular revealed that some test subjects activated their lips, tongue, larynx, and respiration, if only minimally, when talking to themselves or singing to themselves. The French physiologist Gilbert Ballet (discussed in chapter 2) found himself to be just such a “motor type,” though he was uncertain whether the almost imperceptible micromotions that accompanied his inner speech occurred only in moments of attentive self-observation or in every instance.1 Neuroanatomists and physiologists were not the only ones interested in the phenomenon of micromotions during inner speech, inner music, and thinking with sound more generally. As outlined in chapters 3 and 4, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, philosopher Henri Bergson, and physicist and psychologist Ernst Mach all responded to findings in the life sciences by treating human speech, music listening, and scientific observation as abilities in which auditory images and motor imagery might be combined.

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In this chapter, I show that the same strands of scientific research were taken up in work on aesthetic perception at the turn of the twentieth century. Traditionally, aesthetic perception had been a domain of philosophical aesthetics, and the sense of beauty described in metaphysical terms. In the late nineteenth century, however, novel experimental ways of studying aesthetic perception emerged, building bridges between the life sciences and a range of disciplines in the humanities. The result was what came to be called “experimental aesthetics.” Recent scholarship has already identified epistemic and disciplinary crossovers in the field of experimental aesthetics around 1900. Most of this literature focuses on the exchange of research instruments and concepts between the sciences and the humanities, though some also identifies “systematic variations or ‘schools’ of aesthetic research” such as experimental physiology, empirical psychology, or the philosophical aesthetics of empathy.2 A closer look at research on physical micromotions during aesthetic experience renders such variations even more visible, leading me to argue that the “great divide” runs not only between the humanities and sciences, but also (if not more) between the agendas of different disciplines, schools, and individual scholars within the humanities. These divisions are especially striking in a cluster of humanities disciplines just emerging around 1900—literary studies, musicology, and theater studies—that were intrigued by the prickle in the throat that a person experiences when reading a book, listening to music, or watching a performance. Involuntary micromotions became a favorite object of comparison in these disciplines, and a wide range of research methods were applied to examine genre-specific effects on a person’s body and mind. The underlying question was which artistic genre—music, literature, or theater—had the greatest physical effect on its audience and, relatedly, which discipline was most clearly authorized to pass judgment on those effects, refining its own unconscious practices of aesthetic experience into knowledge techniques. In what follows, I track such research on the physical effects of the arts in the German-speaking academic world. As we will see, a network of scholars mainly based in Leipzig and Berlin shared an interest in those effects despite differing substantially in their approach. At the same time, attention to muscle feelings in readers, concertgoers, and theater audiences gave rise to new and far-reaching questions as scientists and scholars from a range of disciplines engaged in long-running disagreement over whether human behavior is determined by genetics, cultural environment, or both.3

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The Reader’s Larynx One initiator of reading research in the decades around 1900 was Wilhelm Wundt, head of the experimental psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig. Wundt’s psychophysical parallelism—the hypothesis of a generally applicable correspondence and constant mutual influence between physical and psychological processes4—was well suited to elaborate the argument that associations between motor and auditory imagery do not confine themselves to the brain, instead involving the entire motor system. In this respect, Wundt was inspired by Viennese pathologist Salomon Stricker, who had published two much-noted studies on speech and motor imagery in 1880 and 1882.5 According to Stricker, all forms of allegedly silent thinking are accompanied by “muscle feelings” (Muskelgefühle).6 Observing himself, Stricker found that silently recalling a familiar folk song caused him an intense and “peculiar feeling in the larynx” and (because he had a habit of whistling to himself) a “feeling in the lips.”7 After conversations about such muscle feelings with more than one hundred people, all of whom confirmed his observations, Stricker summarily concluded that these feelings were “normal,” occurring in everyone and at all times.8 In the first volume of his Völkerpsychologie (Ethnopsychology, ten volumes, 1900–1920), Wundt echoed Stricker in claiming that silent reading, too, is habitually accompanied by almost imperceptible motor feelings. In a footnote, however, he hinted at the possibility of individual differences in reading: inexperienced readers either read the graphic characters phonetically or whisper them silently, whereas trained readers are capable of holding their tongue and larynx, but still perceive tiny movements of their speech organs while reading.9 What was addressed en passant in Völkerpsychologie became a major concern for Wundt’s student Rudolf Pintner. In 1910, Pintner conducted a series of reading experiments at the Institute for Experimental Pedagogy and Psychology, an establishment affiliated with the Leipzig teachers’ association. Initially, his trials were intended to respond to a broader debate in the field of psychology about whether readers understand a word by successively processing each letter (apperceptive reading) or by apprehending the entire word and then grasping what they see through processes of association (assimilative reading).10 Using a tachistoscope, Pintner confronted his twenty-nine test subjects with 121 stimulus words. Although almost all of the subjects turned out to use both methods, most of them tended toward assimilative reading.11 At this point, Pintner began to ask whether there is a correlation between the speed of reading and the

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auditory or muscular associations that arise as a person grasps a written word.12 If so, he wondered, is it possible to influence, suppress, or even reinforce reading capacities through a form of training geared toward such associations? Pintner would return to this question. By the time he did, he had moved to the United States and spent his first summer at the University of Chicago conducting further experiments on “inner speech during silent reading.”13 He now wished to discover whether it is possible to break the “universal habit” of producing articulatory movements during silent reading, as his mentor Wundt had assumed and a series of recent American studies on the improvement of reading rates had also claimed.14 In his report on the experiments, Pintner criticized the introspective approaches practiced by Solomon Stricker and others in the study of unconscious motions,15 and advocated for more objective measurements of the movements of the larynx while reading—measurements made possible by the laryngograph, a precision instrument that had been refined since the French phonetician l’abbé Rousselot introduced it in the 1880s (chapter 3).16 At Wundt’s experimental psychology lab in Leipzig, Felix Krueger and Wilhelm Wirth developed a laryngograph that was soon marketed by the instrument maker Eduard Zimmermann and probably used by Pintner after he moved to Chicago (figures 5.1a and 5.1b). With the help of the laryngograph, Pintner studied the behavior of people reading while simultaneously counting aloud, aiming to suppress their inner speech and the unconscious movements of their speech organs.17 Pintner divided his test materials—one hundred newspaper clippings, seventy to seventy-nine words in length—into three sets. The first set served to determine the ordinary reading rate of his test subjects, the second was read while counting aloud, and the last was for subjects to return to ordinary reading. All the subjects became accustomed to the counting, and both their reading rate and their text comprehension improved when the “accompanying movements” of their speech organs were eliminated. Pintner doubted, though, that readers could be completely weaned off the habit of articulation, given that it was “of such long standing and so deeply rooted in the adult.”18 Despite this pessimism, Pintner continued working on the theme. In a 1913 article, he recommended that in elementary education, oral reading by fourth-grade pupils be replaced by silent reading. Reading aloud too much and thereby training one’s speech organs, he argued, retards the rate of intelligent reading.19 Pintner’s ideas on reading efficiency still haunt today’s speed-reading techniques, as we will see below. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his positivist research on inner

Figures 5.1a and 5.1b: This laryngograph served to measure the vibrations of a singer’s or speaker’s vocal cords. A capsule with a rubber membrane (a in 5.1a) is attached to the thyroid cartilage and connected via a rubber tube to a receiving membrane (st in 5.1b) with a writing brush (b in 5.1b). The adjustable brush (low voices require a longer brush) registers the vibration on a kymograph (a rotating drum driven by clockwork). Photograph and drawing from Felix Krueger and Wilhelm Wirth, “Ein neuer Kehltonschreiber,” Wundts Psychologische Studien 1, no. 1 (1906), 103 and 104.

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speech during silent reading inspired a group of philologists in Leipzig and Berlin to take it in a different direction.

Feeling the Author’s Voice Whose larynx is it that a reader feels moving when they read a poem? Is it their own or that of the author of the poem? These and similar questions guided the work of the Leipzig phonetician Eduard Sievers, famous in his day for his methods of voice analysis. Much has been written on Sievers’s methodology by historians of literature and media scholars.20 If I now return to this phonetician and his “philology of the ear,”21 it is because of the line of thinking that leads to him from Wundt and Pintner. Starting around 1900, Sievers aspired to find new ways of examining historical texts. On the grounds that “a good declamation, a good performance is the best commentary on a piece of literature,”22 he supplemented silent textual study with a performative method. Reading aloud or reciting would, he believed, reproduce the text’s “inner musical characteristics”: the pitch, modulation, tone-steps, and rhythm of the author’s voice.23 In what would later be called “sound analysis” (Schallanalyse), Sievers identified six types of authorial voice and ninety-six subordinate “voice varieties” potentially encountered while reading a literary text of any historical period.24 Willing readers, he wrote, can “instinctively” feel their way into an author’s voice type, sensing it through their own “bodily disposition” while reading the author’s text aloud.25 To ensure that both general readers and philologists could make use of his findings, Sievers visualized the voice types, and the micromotions of the chest, larynx, lips, and tongue that were required to produce them, in shapes he called “personal curves.” He embodied these curves in “optical signals”: a set of brass-wire figures enabling the correct vocal disposition (cold or warm, major or minor, lyrical or dramatic) to be found while declaiming (figure 5.2).26 These handcrafted optical signals were far more than mere bricolage for Sievers. He believed they could underpin a scientifically valid technique of experiencing a literary text. Sievers was certainly familiar with Pintner’s studies, but his interest lay in the articulation of the reader’s inner voice, not its repression. In 1915–16, Sievers and his assistant Willy E. Peters carried out an experiment to this effect at Wundt’s Psychological Institute in Leipzig. Eight test readers, including Sievers himself, declaimed Friedrich Schiller’s ballad “Rudolf of Hapsburg” while holding in their hands wire optical signals that supposedly matched Schiller’s voice.27 The readers’ unconscious “inner vibrations” were registered with a recording capsule and a kymograph held to

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Figure 5.2: A selection of Eduard Sievers’s “optical signals” constructed of brass wire by the phonetician himself in 1915–16. By holding the figures in their hands, readers were supposed to be able to release their inhibitions and find the vocal attitude appropriate to the text they were reading aloud. University Archive Leipzig, Nachlaß 201–3 (E. Sievers), box 1. Photograph by the author.

the larynx as they spoke into a phonograph horn (figure 5.3). The resulting laryngographic curves were then transferred to music manuscript paper and compared with the phonograms of the readings. Peters and Sievers identified a broadly similar vocal adaptation to the text among all the test subjects, visible in similar motions of the laryngeal musculature.28 They also discovered that when using the optical signals, all the test subjects achieved similar results as regards pitch, rhythm, intonation, and gesture. From these, Peters and Sievers concluded that it was indeed possible to bring an author’s voice back to life in almost any reader, though admittedly, the more practiced test subjects responded more reliably to the “Sievers directives” and could imitate the desired way of speaking more exactly than the inexperienced ones.29 In the 1920s, Sievers abandoned the mechanical recording of laboratory research to concentrate on the observation of reading behavior, mainly by attending to his own inner voice and accompanying physical posture as he read.30 This consciously subjective methodology earned him much denigration, with critics including the musicologist Gustav Becking. Beck-

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Figure 5.3: In Sievers and Peters’s 1915–16 experiment, a test subject holds two of Sievers’s optical signals in his hands—a minor signal in his right hand, a major signal in his left hand—while he is looking at the combination of the two figures indicated in the form of “personal curves” below the text from which he is reading. Drawing from Willy E. Peters, “Stimmgebungsstudien. I: Der Einfluß der Sievers’schen Signale und Bewegungen auf die Sprachmelodie. Experimentalphonetisch untersucht,” Psychologische Studien 10 (1917), 393.

ing had worked with Sievers on the sound analysis of musical works during an adjunctship at Leipzig and, for a 1921 study on musical rhythm, the two men also developed “personal curves” (called “Beckingkurven” at the time). At this point, Becking still believed that when listening to music, one could “swim along” with it and move as if one were the original composer.31 As they listened, his experimental subjects held in their hands a little rod that could be used to record the curves characteristic of the composer in question.32 In Becking’s view, the various musical genres showed three possible curves and a range of sub-types.33 In 1923, however, Becking complained that although Sievers’s technique usefully encouraged concentrated musical listening, for musicological purposes it was a “dead end.”34 Whereas for Sievers the best sound analyst was an unprejudiced musical listener who had no prior training and was open to new methods (ideally Sievers himself), for Becking music could only “come to life” through detailed knowledge of the work—such humanities knowledge was bound to inscribe itself into the unconscious motions of the larynx and other organs that accompany listening. Because

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Sievers’s technique ignored the need for such a profound study of literary and musical works, it lacked “humanities-based evidentiality,” while its strong orientation on Sievers’s own person also robbed it of scientific objectivity and plausibility.35 According to Becking, Sievers’s technique thus did not fulfill the requirements of either the humanities or the sciences. Despite these objections, Sievers’s sound analysis initially remained popular as a resource for phonetic work on sound shifts, the study of poetic meter, and philological attempts to determine authorship. The latter point was of interest particularly to classical philologists, medievalists, theologians, and criminologists,36 but also to modern literary scholars who were searching for ways to integrate methods from experimental phonetics into their disciplinary agenda. Among these scholars was the Germanist Julius Petersen. For his 1924 study of the famous conversations dictated by Goethe to his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann, Petersen asked Sievers for an evaluation of the conversations’ authenticity. Sievers believed he could identify the “Goethean word order” in individual remarks, but in other passages he felt the voice of Eckermann arising from his larynx from three distinct phases of writing and revision.37 This sound analysis confirmed Petersen’s view that Eckermann had for the most part paraphrased the conversations and that “all the speech had passed through his own medium.” Sievers’s technique, Petersen concluded, offered clear insights over longer passages.38 Fifteen years later, Petersen dismissed sound analysis as obsolete and pointed out the miracle method’s many sources of error, arising from “inaccurate sound reproduction and the incorrect reception of what is heard.” Sievers’s procedure was deeply subjective, suggestive, and irrational—far removed from a “reliable, manageable method.”39 It is quite possible that Petersen’s later doubts about Sievers’s sound analysis were nourished by his academic environment in Berlin. Petersen became a professor of German literature at the University of Berlin in 1920 and was increasingly involved in shaping the field of humanities in the city. I will return to Petersen’s science policy agenda at the end of this chapter, but not before discussing the writings on musical aesthetics by philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, another key figure in humanities at the time.

Singing Research and the Larynxes of the Deceased Today, Carl Stumpf ’s name is mainly associated with the Institute of Psychology in Berlin, which he directed from its beginnings in 1894 until 1921. Among the Institute’s most celebrated strands of research was what Stumpf called “tone psychology.” This area had started to take shape much

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earlier in Stumpf ’s career, when he was still professor of philosophy at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague. In his two-volume study Tonpsychologie (Tone Psychology) of 1883, written in Prague, Stumpf combined numerous methodological approaches to studying human musicality. One of his aims particularly important in the present context was to investigate physical micromotions that seem to accompany musical practices such as singing, listening to music, and even thinking about musical sounds. More specifically, Stumpf wanted to know whether such micromotions occur in everyone, or only in some musical subjects. If such individual differences exist, are they a matter of inheritance or of musical education and training? Do the almost imperceptible laryngeal activities in singing, for example, vary between professional singers and laypeople? These questions responded to developments in vocal culture that arose during Stumpf ’s early career after the invention of the laryngoscope by the Spanish opera singer and voice instructor Manuel P. Rodríguez García in 1854.40 Teaching voice at the Paris Conservatory had fueled García’s curiosity about the physical process of singing. He acquired a dentist’s tool, an angled mirror with a long handle, and placed it cautiously against his own uvula while vocalizing. García used a hand mirror to view his laryngopharynx and was taken by surprise at how well he could see the various movements of his own glottis. García’s observations were discussed in eminent scientific circles as soon as they were published, and his instrumental setup was refined for the purpose of medical inspection (figure 5.4).41 In parallel, García’s methods were taken up by both professional and lay singers. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, the German market was awash with self-study handbooks on singing in churches, in schools, or on the stage, driven by the confidence that almost anyone’s voice can be healed, shaped, and perfected by “vocal gymnastics” and “vocal hygiene.”42 More experienced voice teachers took offense at the amateurish approach of most such publications. Among these critics was Emma Seiler, a German singer whose late career as voice instructor brought her to North America. Seiler recommended replacing the regionally diverse and idiosyncratic methods of vocal education with a unified, modern, and scientifically informed teaching of the natural laws of singing.43 No research instrument seemed better suited to that purpose than the laryngoscope.44 Accordingly, Seiler’s 1861 textbook Altes und Neues über die Ausbildung des Gesangorganes (The Voice in Singing, 1879) draws deeply on García’s observations with the laryngoscope, and reports on her own work teaching with the instrument (figure 5.5).45 Her professed goal was to restore the voices of female soprano singers that had suffered under

Figure 5.4: To adapt García’s experimental setting for medical examinations, instrument makers expanded the singer’s device into a laryngoscope and replaced his hand mirror with a reflector to be attached to the physician’s forehead. García himself drafted this image for the 1878 edition of his Traité complet de l’art du chant. From Manuel García, Hints on Singing by Manuel García, translated by Beata Garcia (New York: Aschberg, Hopwood and Crew, 1894), v. Bibliothèque National de France, gallica.bnf.fr.

Figure 5.5: This drawing shows the different registers of singing (here, the production of head tones) as observed with the help of a laryngoscope. Emma Seiler, The Voice in Singing, translated by William Henry Furness (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1879), 58.

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ignorant and injurious instruction by male tenors.46 Instead of forcing the student’s registers beyond their natural bounds, she advocated the development of Kehlfertigkeit, or laryngeal dexterity (translated as “flexibility of voice” in the English version of her book): the gradual formation of a soft throat, which facilitates the full use of one’s registers and smooth transitions from one register to another.47 When Seiler spoke of the voice as “a talent or faculty innate,” something that “in the case of other instruments, can only be laboriously acquired,”48 she posited an inborn beauty in everyone’s voice that needs nothing but a proper education in Kehlfertigkeit. Carl Stumpf took a more skeptical approach. In Tonpsychologie, he mused on whether the voices of dead singers or actors, too, were preserved in their larynxes. If so, was it possible to deduce a deceased person’s musicality—meaning, for Stumpf, the accuracy of their “tonal judgment” (Tonurteil) regarding musical pitches and tone distances—from their lifeless throat? “A Viennese doctor has recently examined the larynxes of renowned singers and perceived nothing special about them,” wrote Stumpf with disappointment. “But in the neural cores that produce the connection of the centre of volition with the larynx and also produce the combination of the muscle fibres for common activity there must be innate differences which dispose people to more refined movement and greater muscular sensitivity. Perhaps also there are differences in the connecting paths between centres of tone and muscle.”49 The “Viennese physician” that Stumpf had in mind when he speculated about the laryngeal memory of deceased singers was probably the pathologist Salomon Stricker, mentioned earlier in this chapter, for whom every human activity was primarily a physical activity essentially bound to motor memories and motor imagery.50 But although Stumpf agreed with neuroanatomists such as Stricker that “tonal sensation [Tonempfindung] and the innervations of the larynx” were usually interdependent,51 he criticized them for their reliance on very general neuroanatomical schemata and their psychological claims regarding associationism, which were based on unsystematic autopsies and introspective observation. For Stumpf, such attempts to localize musical memories in the brain, larynx, or lips may be able to explain “where one is hearing and imagining, but we do not know how.”52 He considered it far more important to delve into the question of what leads to the formation of a laryngeal memory. Stumpf believed that certain “innate distinctions” do exist, predisposing some people to be more musical than others. In Tonpsychologie, he suggested that cultural dispositions are inherited across generations: “Ear and brain, in their present conduct, store in their archives the practice of our ancestors and the history of music as it has become flesh and spirit

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throughout the millennia.”53 Quite in this line, he spoke of the musician’s natural, inherited dowry (Mitgift), but cautiously added that no one yet knows exactly of what that dowry consists.54 Addressing these issues, Stumpf also anticipated some of the aspects discussed slightly later by French philosopher Théodule Ribot in his 1888 study Psychologie de l’Attention (The Psychology of Attention). Ribot, who held the chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the Collège de France in Paris from 1889 (see chapter 3), drew on the psychophysical parallelism posited by German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt to show that aesthetic perception is, first and foremost, a sophisticated physical process.55 Even seemingly passive modes of observation such as attending a theater performance or listening to a concert, wrote Ribot, were dependent on the “adaptation of eyes, head, body, limbs, changes of respiration and cerebral circulation, etc., and the conscious or unconscious reaction of all these phenomena upon the brain.”56 More generally, Ribot compared these involuntary motor reactions to reflex movements, asserting that some were “natural and innate” and others “acquired, secondary, and fixed by repetition and by habit.”57 Ribot’s claim was an intervention in the contemporary debate on the relative significance of “nature and nurture”—the question of whether certain human capacities are inherited or nurtured by familial or cultural backgrounds, education, and training.58 Ribot stressed the factor of inheritance as much as that of culturally acquired habits, but regarding involuntary motor reactions he also adduced a psychological theory, more generally accepted in his day, that partially sidestepped the issue of inheritance and postulated that human beings belong, by nature, to particular sensory types: the acoustic, visual, or motor type, or a hybrid type. Following this taxonomy, Ribot distinguished between different types of aesthetic perception, with different degrees of sensitivity to auditory, visual, and motor stimulation.59 For people of the motor type, he stated, there is no pure auditory or visual perception, because even when they remain motionless they find that “intense reflection is accompanied by an incipient word, motions of the larynx, the tongue, and the lips.” The state of “ideal audition, or of ideal vision” can only be achieved by the acoustic and visual types.60 Like Ribot, Stumpf took up a rather undecided position in the nature versus nurture debate of the day. Overall, however, his focus was not inheritance, but cultural nurturing of musical subjects. After conversations with several friends and acquaintances, he noted that not everyone who listens to music feels a prickle in the throat. Some of the musicians Stumpf questioned said that they listened solely with their ears (and their tonal memory). Furthermore, a person might possess a very refined tonal

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judgment but a very clumsy larynx, or vice versa.61 Stumpf doubted that simply creating a typology of memory types, as proposed by Ribot, can adequately explain why some people make more use of their larynx than others when listening, speaking, and singing. Indeed, that typology proved ineffective even in his own case. Observing himself, Stumpf found that at times he based his tone judgment on muscle feelings, but “in thousands of other cases,” such feelings failed to appear. When tuning his violin, his auditory memory would produce an A4, his larynx remaining absolutely still. Even when singing, “a certain ‘larynx-presentation’ does not first arise in my consciousness, not even a particular ‘muscular presentation’ [Muskelvorstellung], but rather the tone itself, and I adjust my larynx, if it is not instantly correct, in accordance with the tone that I am imagining until the tone as sung matches the tone as imagined.”62 Stumpf ’s own musical experience thus induced him to claim that tone judgments may be, but are not necessarily, bound to associations between acoustic images and motor images. Among musicians, the most proficient string players seemed to be particularly unaffected by muscle feelings.63 In other words, “laryngeal feelings” in tone perception tend to decrease with an increase in musical expertise; only lay musicians and singers reported habitually feeling their larynx ascend when they imagined high notes. In addition, Stumpf noted that laryngeal feelings appear to be bound up with modes of affective listening, even concluding that muscle feelings were the source of Beethoven’s now famous outbursts of tears when he heard his grand masses. Nevertheless, stressed Stumpf, these feelings were not what inspired the genius’s compositions in the first place.64 More generally, Stumpf suspected that laryngeal feelings are bound to specific musical cultures. In early European vocal music, for instance, sharp tones were associated with a stretched larynx, a raised head, and an image of spatial highness and moral sublimity. Contemporary music, by contrast, required artists to abandon that tradition. Pitch level and spatial imagination, Stumpf found, had tended to disconnect ever since Berlioz began deconstructing this clearly defined association in the musical imagination.65 In theoretical terms, Stumpf correlated such individually and culturally differing tone sensations with a person’s “consciousness of sensation” (Empfindungsbewusstsein), defined as an ongoing feedback loop between outward stimulation, sensory perception, memory images, and physical skills and habits.66 This consciousness of sensation is self-referential in that it consists of a latent awareness of one’s own experiences of the past and consequent sensory dispositions. “As a matter of fact,” Stumpf explained,

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“what we grasp by hearing is not only a tone, but also hearing itself.”67 In 1890, Stumpf added the colorful term “music-infected consciousness” (musik-infiziertes Bewusstsein) to describe a mental state that takes shape in close interaction with individual customs of music-making and listening as well as the cultural environment and local musical traditions.68 Stumpf ’s choice of the striking phrase “music-infected consciousness” was an indirect rebuke to physiologists (particularly Hermann von Helmholtz with his notion of the “sensation of tone,” mentioned in chapter 4) and experimental psychologists (specifically those associated with Wilhelm Wundt) who focused on the laws of human hearing alone and disregarded the cultural and individual nurturing of ears, brains, and larynxes.69 Certainly, the research on reading behavior carried out at Wundt’s experimental psychology lab in Leipzig was only peripherally concerned with individual variations. Although Wundt himself briefly mentioned in his study Völkerpsychologie that the degree of motor activity in reading might depend on the test subject’s literacy, his student Rudolf Pintner left aside the individual reading experience of his test subjects. Pintner sought general laws and ways to improve reading speed by reducing laryngeal activities in any subject. Similarly, the phonetician Eduard Sievers conducted experiments in Wundt’s laboratory that investigated the reader’s general ability to revive an author’s voice from a historical piece of text. Any reader, Sievers believed, can slip into the voice of an author and adopt the required laryngeal posture. Stumpf, in contrast, was interested in the individually and culturally varying modes of musical experience, with a somewhat undecided standpoint in the nature-nurture debate but in clear opposition to his Leipzig and Paris colleagues’ highly generalizing, or typologizing, views on experimental aesthetics.

Laboratory Humanities Stumpf ’s Tonpsychologie and other early writings left their mark on the work of his Institute of Psychology in Berlin. The Institute was established in 1894, an important moment in the discipline of psychology. In the preceding decade, Berlin philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey had been instrumental in staking out epistemological distinctions between the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) and the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften).70 During that process of differentiation, controversy arose around the affiliation of research fields, such as psychology, that might be considered to belong to either side (see also chapters 2 and 4). Whereas Dilthey’s “understanding psychology” insisted on the cognitive, experiential, and interpretive capacities of the human mind (and

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addressed both individual and cultural variations of mental states), psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt or Hermann Ebbinghaus worked with experimental methods from the life sciences and focused more generally on the nature and laws of human perception and judgment. In 1893, concerned by the apparent irreconcilability of these approaches, Dilthey blocked the appointment of the experimental psychologist Ebbinghaus as a full professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin. Believing that Ebbinghaus’s research was a “scientific radicalization of philosophy,”71 Dilthey chose instead to back Stumpf, who was duly appointed professor of philosophy. Stumpf founded the university’s Psychology Seminar in 1894; it became the Institute of Psychology in 1900.72 In his role at the University of Berlin, Stumpf partially adopted Dilthey’s sharply drawn duality between psychology’s different epistemic interests; however, he combined methodological approaches from the life sciences, such as stimulus-response experiments, with those from the humanities, such as introspection, interviewing and comparing individual test subjects and comparative scholarship on non-Western cultures and habits. Stumpf, a “philosopher in the lab,” thus extended the laboratory culture of the life sciences to the humanities disciplines involved in his Institute.73 By that time, the laboratory had become the “iconic space of modern science,” a guarantor for the maintenance of practical skills, research, and training in the natural sciences.74 By making extensive use of the latest laboratory facilities and imitating the collective research style of contemporary laboratory sciences, Stumpf helped to create a new field that may be called the “laboratory humanities.” To be sure, Stumpf was not the first to champion laboratory research in the humanities. Earlier examples include the labs established by the linguists and phoneticians Louis Havet, Michel Bréal, Étienne-Jules Marey, Léon Vaïsse, Charles Rosapelly, and l’abbé Pierre-Jean Rousselot in latenineteenth-century Paris (discussed in chapter 3). As we saw earlier in this chapter, the Leipzig laboratory of Stumpf ’s rival Wilhelm Wundt, too, inspired humanities research; in parallel with Stumpf ’s endeavor, the now-celebrated experimental psychology lab at Harvard University was established by German psychologist Hugo Münsterberg between 1905 and 1916.75 What made Stumpf’s laboratory special was the sheer scale of its impact on humanities research. With its numerous soon-to-be-famed doctoral students, assistants, and associates, the Institute exerted great influence on several disciplines in the early twentieth century, including physical anthropology, philosophical aesthetics, phonetics, linguistics, art history, language studies, and theater studies.76 The Institute of Psychology was

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also home to the Berlin school of comparative musicology,77 while retrospectively, it is famed as the cradle of the Berlin school of Gestalt theory.78 Another reason to remark on Stumpf’s wide-ranging influence is that his notions of the “music-infected consciousness” and culture-bound “listening attitudes” were, as has recently been pointed out, echoed by Edmund Husserl and a network of less prominent phenomenologists in Weimar Germany, including Gustav Güldenstein, Hans Mersmann, Moritz Geiger, Paul Bekker, Herbert Eimert, and Arthur Wolfgang Cohn. Much like Stumpf, these scholars tried to prove that the experience of musical tonality, value, and meaning depends less on the “natural” physiological process of hearing than on an intentional, conscious, and therefore “unnatural” attitude toward musical phenomena.79 Husserlian phenomenology, however, was clearly defined as a science of the mind (to translate the German Geisteswissenschaft literally; see chapter 2), whereas Stumpf and his closer circle of colleagues remained interested in laboratory research and situated themselves between the life sciences and the humanities. I return to Stumpf ’s own laboratory-based work on listening attitudes in chapter 6. First, though, let us look at how Stumpf ’s studies on motor perception in aesthetic experience and remarks on laryngeal memory recurred in more than a few of his close colleagues’ subsequent studies, conducted both in Stumpf ’s laboratory and beyond.

Laboratory Research and Big Data on Perfect Pitch In 1901, Stumpf ’s assistant, psychologist and musicologist Otto Abraham, published a much-noted study addressing what was commonly known at the time as “perfect pitch” or “absolute pitch,” though he preferred to call it “absolute tone consciousness.”80 This facility involved not merely the identification of tones or sensitivity to minimal pitch differences, but a broader range of individually differing abilities—whether singing and whistling by sight or spontaneously reproducing previously heard melodies.81 Abraham also proposed to replace the notion of relative pitch with the more general category of a “musical memory” for intervals, rhythm, harmony, melody, and “consciousness of musical keys.”82 All of these abilities, the psychologist argued, arise not so much from native genius as from a tailored musical background and successful physical and mental musical education. Abraham’s term “absolute tone consciousness” drew attention to Stumpf ’s work, as well as to earlier studies on perfect pitch by Jena physiologist William Thierry Preyer and British musicologist and phonetician Alexander J. Ellis.83 International standards in pitch not yet having been

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established, Preyer and Ellis had argued that one could not simply say “‘a good ear knows when a note is in tune,’ because the meaning of ‘being in tune’ is at present unfixed both as to standard pitch and desired intervals.”84 Equally importantly, they did not offer a definition of what is understood today as perfect pitch, a rare ability that is inherited and, although it may be enhanced by musical education in early childhood, cannot be acquired at a later stage.85 Both were more interested in a sense of subtle distinctions that was not (or not essentially) innate, but the outcome of individual musical practices. In his Tonpsychologie of 1883, Stumpf built on the work of Preyer and Ellis; instead of attributing perfect pitch to the refinement of the sense of hearing, he spoke of “absolute tone memory,” arguing that a perfect ear depends on a perfect memory. For Stumpf, that memory is not necessarily confined to processes of auditory cognition but can involve motor memories and laryngeal memories in particular. Developing Stumpf ’s work, Otto Abraham regarded the term “absolute tone consciousness” as partly misleading, because he was also—indeed, primarily—interested in unconscious processes of tone perception.86 He found that not only sensitivity to tone pitch, but all unconscious associations between the sensory centers in the brain, the larynx, and the whole body could be strengthened in order to acquire what he now called a “memory of absolute pitch.”87 To underline his point, Abraham grounded his research in recent work in association psychology—well aware that his mentor, Stumpf, had taken a stand against associationism.88 Abraham cited the famous bell model presented by the French neuroanatomist Jean-Martin Charcot (see chapter 2) to visualize the connections of auditory, visual, and motor impressions and the associations in the brain established over the course of a human life.89 For the musical mind, Abraham expanded on this schema to visualize the associations between the auditory images of tones, the words representing those tones, and imagined tones and tone colors in the “absolute memory” (figure 5.6).90 Additionally, he suggested that there might be associations between tone images and motor memory, introducing the somewhat unwieldy term “absolute laryngeal muscle consciousness” (absolutes Kehlkopfmuskel-Bewußtsein).91 Abraham’s coinage underlines once again just how much attention the larynx received in musical aesthetics at the time. Admittedly, his term was chosen playfully to describe a thought experiment. Abraham imagined a well-trained singer who did not have perfect pitch but was nonetheless able to reproduce musical pitches exactly by unconsciously activating the correct laryngeal posture. To ascertain that ability, Abraham initially considered provoking the laryngeal posture for each musical pitch by exposing

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Figure 5.6: Abraham’s scheme of neurophysiological associations illustrates how F♯ is represented in the human mind by the interplay of the auditory image of F♯ (Tonvorstellung) and the representation of the word “F sharp” (Wortvorstellung). Motor representations are not part of this diagram, but Abraham addressed them in the text of his paper “Das absolute Tonbewußtsein: Psychologisch-musikalische Studie,” Sammelbände der internationalen Musikgesellschaft 3, no. 1 (1901), 71.

a test person’s cricothyroid muscle (the muscle that helps to tense the vocal cords) to electrical stimuli of varying current strength. Told by various laryngologists that it was impossible to stimulate the cricothyroid muscle in isolation, however, the psychologist admitted that the supposed “absolute laryngeal muscle consciousness” exists only in the abstract; in practice, laryngeal memories are always already connected to acoustic images.92 He finally came to the conclusion that laryngeal memories, and even more so the memories of their own singing, support the tone judgment of most singers and instrumentalists, whereas certain more elaborate musical abilities (imagining compound tones, reproducing one musical tone while imagining another, and so on) depend mainly on auditory cognitive abilities.93 Taking the point further, Abraham claimed that not only sensitivity to tone pitch, but all unconscious associations between the sensory centers in the brain, the larynx, and a person’s whole body can be strengthened in order to acquire absolute tone consciousness.94 This gave the lie to Stumpf ’s somewhat dubious assumptions on the “innate distinctions” between singers’ larynxes and on the musician’s “natural dowry” more generally. His own research, said Abraham, had shown that a person’s tone consciousness is not hereditary to any great extent, but that there are accidental anatomical dispositions and that hearing takes different forms depending on surrounding musical culture and individually differ-

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ing musical experiences.95 In short, Abraham concluded that inheritance has little to no influence on musicality or on particular musical abilities such as perfect pitch. Abraham arrived at these conclusions after carrying out laboratory tests at the Institute of Psychology in Berlin. To test the identification of minimal pitch differences, each of his test subjects was presented with test tones of varying pitch levels, intensities, durations, and sequences. Abraham, who considered himself to have perfect pitch, unreservedly sang, whistled, and played various instruments to his subjects. He found that some of them identified the pitch levels by way of the instruments’ tone color, prompting him to use an electric motor-driven Edison phonograph to test what he called “consciousness of musical keys” with “pure tones” (tones independent of the timbre that accompanies their pitch level when reproduced on particular instruments, such as violins or pianos). When confronted with these “pure tones,” Abraham’s best-performing subjects vacillated in their tone judgments. Being acquainted with a musical instrument thus seems to have a great impact on a person’s absolute tone consciousness.96 Similar results were obtained in another laboratory test series examining the role of familiarity with musical tropes. In these tests, a siren was used to produce four- or five-note sequences in rapid successions of 0.042 to 0.075 seconds per tone. Abraham himself and Berlin composer and music pedagogue Oscar Raif attempted to identify the sequences, but regardless of the actual harmonic structure, they both believed in most cases that they had heard the dominant-seventh chords so widespread in late Romantic music.97 Once again, the two test subjects’ “music-infected consciousness” seemed to prejudice their abilities as regards both absolute pitch and relative pitch. In addition to methods of self-observation and the testing of selected subjects in the laboratory, Abraham appears to have been the first and only member of Stumpf ’s immediate circle to use surveys and the statistical analysis of big—or at least bigger—data to prove his point. He chose one hundred test subjects, thinking carefully about his choice of “violinists, pianists, singers, the first psychologists and self-observers.”98 He then sent out a detailed questionnaire comprising nineteen questions inquiring into the respondents’ musical preferences, unconscious abilities, and family members with absolute pitch, placing special emphasis on means of training musical skills. Were the subjects only able to name correctly the note they had heard, or could they also reproduce it by singing or whistling? Could they identify individual notes or the key of chords and melodies? Did the subjects compare what they heard against an internally fixed tone

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(concert pitch A4)? Further questions in the survey addressed the associations evoked by certain tones: did they conjure up the letter label of the note, a timbre, a tone characteristic, a color, a mood, or a feeling of tension in the larynx, fingers, or veins?99 When designing his survey, Abraham most likely drew on the complex questionnaires employed in neighboring fields such as cultural anthropology. Anthropologist Francis Galton’s 1883 questionnaire on “the degree in which different persons possess the power of seeing images in their mind’s eye, and of reviving past sensations,” for example, explored auditory mental representations such as “[t]he beat of rain against the window panes, the crack of a whip, a church bell, the hum of bees, the whistle of a railway, the clinking of tea-spoons and saucers, the slam of a door.”100 But unlike Galton, a keen eugenicist whose questionnaires sought to prove genetic differences between populations, Abraham took his studies to be evidence against a genetic interpretation of musical talent. In fact, he insisted that musical cultures were coterminous with education and physical practice. “No child is born into the world with the ability to identify a standard A,” he wrote. “Other than that, the results of my survey convinced me that inheritance has no significant influence on absolute tone consciousness. More than half of the respondents stated that no family member had absolute tone consciousness or other musical talents.”101 Although Abraham’s data-based remarks oppose Stumpf ’s earlier claims on the existence of innate musical dispositions, there was no direct disagreement between the two men. However, Stumpf later nudged his assistant’s work in a direction that Abraham had not intended. In his 1901 study, Abraham reminisced about a parrot that he had owned some time before. Continuing his studies on perfect pitch at home, he would always sing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 to his avian companion. After a while, the bird astonished its master by whistling the opening motif of the symphony in absolutely correct tune: “G–G–G–E-flat.” Just once, the parrot erred by a semitone and struck A-flat instead of G, but it interrupted itself after the third tone and started afresh.102 Abraham continued to train the bird for several years and found that it showed impressive talent with regard to perfect pitch, but none for musical transposition.103 In 1911, Stumpf used Abraham’s bird experiments as grounds to call for a clearer demarcation between human and animal hearing. What distinguishes humans from animals musically, in Stumpf ’s view, is their capacity to transpose; he even suggested adding musical transposition to Charles Darwin’s list of the criteria of human musicality. On the other hand, Stumpf saw in common between humans and animals their capacity for perfect pitch, which is why he described perfect pitch not as musi-

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cal ingenuity, but as an animal heritage.104 But he supposed that “a bird’s feeling of pleasure—if it is linked to the sounds themselves (for muscular sensations probably also contribute to this)—may well be substantially different from that of human beings’ listening to human and avian music.” Here, Stumpf is tentatively reiterating his view that making and listening to music with accompanying “muscular sensations” should mainly be regarded as a sign of musical illiteracy, even an animalistic form of musicality, whereas his colleague Otto Abraham considered muscle feelings in the larynx, tongue, and lips crucial to the musical education of all living beings.

The Politics of Testing Musicality In his writings on absolute tone consciousness, Abraham suggested several new methods of applying his findings to the training of audition.105 Again, the education of the larynx and auditory-motor associations more generally was an important objective. Advising on teaching singing to youngsters, for instance, Abraham warned that they should not be confronted with too many voice models at once, because the mother, father, and siblings all work from “different larynxes” and therefore risk confusing the child’s tone judgment.106 Instead, Abraham proposed to train the associative capacities by confronting children daily with the sound of tuning forks or whistles and inviting them to develop their own acoustic, visual, and motor associations with the sounds—if need be, by rewarding their arduous and solitary “associative work” with pieces of chocolate.107 Abraham’s testing and training methods never gained a particularly high profile. They were, though, famously taken up by Georg Schünemann, a music educator at the Berlin Academy of Music. In 1921, Schünemann established his aptitude test—a “test for the talented,” Begabtenprüfung—at a time when young musicians from the age of thirteen were being sought for the Academy’s orchestra classes, which were expanding for military reasons.108 Schünemann’s test sheets covered intelligence, perceptiveness, grasp of tones and harmonies, grasp of rhythm, and melody, and were complemented, as was Abraham’s survey, by a set of medical examinations to evaluate the test subjects’ physical aptitude, including motor perception.109 In the subsequent years, Schünemann refined his entrance examinations, considering them essential to a new musical education founded, again influenced by Abraham, less on the belief in innate talents and the wunderkind ideal than on the identification of musical “total personali-

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ties.”110 I will return in chapter 6 to Schünemann, some of whose tests and training methods continued to be applied at the radio laboratory he directed at the Academy of Music from 1928 to 1935. For the moment, it is important to note that Abraham’s view of musicality as an ability based on unconscious associations between sensory centers in the brain, the larynx, and the whole body may, through the intercession of Schünemann, have influenced the testing and training of thousands of musicians who applied to and studied at German conservatories in the 1920s. Another line of influence leads from Abraham’s broad-based notion of musical talent to Carl Emil Seashore’s “Measures of Musical Talent,” which were once applied at numerous educational institutions in the United States and Europe.111 After earning his doctorate at Yale in 1895, Seashore traveled through Europe and seems to have been in contact with Stumpf ’s Institute of Psychology in Berlin, where Abraham was working.112 On this occasion, Seashore may have learned about Abraham’s strong conviction that musicality is a matter of education. Back in the United States, Seashore soon obtained a professorship at the University of Iowa and began to develop, quite in line with Abraham’s phonographic tests of absolute tone consciousness, a series of musicality tests with “pure tones” produced by tuning fork sounds augmented by a vacuum tube resonator.113 Unlike Abraham, who considered “absolute tone memory” a learnable technique that almost everyone could be trained to achieve, Seashore pared absolute pitch back to absolute accuracy in discriminating tones and postulated that only the rarest possess this gift: “It would perhaps, be facetious to say that some persons come into my laboratory at the State University of Iowa with absolute pitch, but no one has yet been known to leave with it, which is the truth.”114 When designing his talent tests, Seashore therefore first proposed to examine a set of abilities, which—again, unlike Abraham—he considered not trainable but innate: the senses of pitch, intensity, time, and consonance.115 Detailing these abilities, Seashore—this time just like Abraham—discussed associationist theories. But the American psychologist dismissed “motor imagery” far more comprehensively than his German colleague. He described it as a disturbing factor for musical talent, something that mainly prompts associations with emotional memories of music. Certainly, a “musician with auditory imagery and imagination is cool and stale if he does not have these bound up with motor imagery and motor tendencies,” wrote Seashore, but the bodily memory stored and activated in a musician’s larynx, lips, tongues, fingers, and feet is “in large part the raw material of emotional expression in music and is

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usually confused with emotion from which it should be clearly distinguished as merely one component element.”116 The silent movements of the bodily organs held little sway here. Seashore’s views on the origins of musical talent shaped the musical culture of the mid-twentieth century. Especially in the United States, the Seashore tests were continually modified and applied well into the 1950s at many elementary schools, high schools, and colleges of music, as well as in military settings.117 Nevertheless, Seashore’s ideas did not go unchallenged, chiefly because his theory of inherent musical abilities was deeply rooted in the eugenics movement of his day—he propagated his measurements as an aid to racial hygiene and the selective breeding of musical talents.118 In a 1923 talk at the National Research Council in Washington, DC, for instance, Seashore took the methods developed by Abraham for his study of absolute tone consciousness to absurd lengths. In place of Abraham’s one hundred test subjects, he proposed to select one hundred newly married couples, “in which we have as large a variety of matings as possible with reference to the presence or absence of musical talent, with the understanding that an endowment provides for the measurement of their children and their children’s mates in successive generations.”119 For this long series of test subjects, Seashore—probably again inspired by Abraham—set out a list of twenty-six habits and abilities that should ideally be tested in each, including “auditory-motor associations” and “motor imagery,” which he regarded as indicators of low musical talent.120 It is important to at least hint at the trail from early research on motor imagery in processes of singing and listening to later implementation in musical testing procedures. If we return to Carl Stumpf ’s ambivalent remarks in 1890 about laryngeal dispositions in singers and instrumentalists that may either be innate or result from musical education, it becomes clear that Stumpf was entering into existing debates in genetics while also aiming to challenge the overly schematic theories of associationism then current in neuroanatomy, especially Stricker’s theory of the omnipresence of motor imagery. Stumpf ’s open and unbiased way of discussing these issues allowed his work to be received in almost diametrically opposite ways. His assistant Otto Abraham strongly disputed Stumpf ’s speculations about the natural dowry of musicians, arguing that a person’s tone consciousness is a matter of education alone and that the existence of a laryngeal memory depends on a musician’s cultural background and individual training. The American psychologist Carl Seashore, by contrast, took Stumpf ’s and Abraham’s work down a far more radical road, claiming that

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musicality—and with it, the ability to suppress laryngeal feelings and other motor imagery in favor of auditory images—is a purely inherited talent. Seashore thus turned his German colleagues’ talk of musicians’ background into a means of identifying alleged hereditary properties, using tests of perceptual discrimination as a tool to construct cultural, social, and racial difference.121

Work Rhythms and Psychotechnics Despite the profound theoretical and political divergences in their approaches, the three psychologists Carl Stumpf, Otto Abraham, and Carl Seashore were all interested in how human beings react physically when confronted with a certain musical tone or piece of music. Their scientific attention on tone perception clearly also responded to the era’s new musical styles, forms, and performance culture. The music listener’s physical reaction was challenged and stimulated by the rhythmic drive of Igor Stravinsky’s ballets, the impressionistic tone paintings of Claude Debussy, the extension of the orchestral apparatus of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, the atonal language of Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples, and the jazz-influenced compositions of Darius Milhaud and George Gershwin. Practices of music listening likewise changed radically in the decades around 1900 as new recording and playback technologies and radio broadcasting enabled the reproduction of any kind of music in public venues, private spaces, and workplaces. In parallel with these developments, industrial psychologists also turned to research on auditory-motor interaction, seeking ways of using musical recordings to enhance workers’ mood and physical output. In the United States, the first study of sound recording as a means of sonic manipulation seems to have been the “mood music” testing carried out by the Edison Company in 1914. The project resulted in a thirty-two-page booklet published in 1921 that presented 135 recordings selected from the current Edison catalogue as examples of “true mood music.”122 Although this compilation of “Edison re-creations” drawn from different Diamond Discs reflects the coexistence of diverse musical styles in the period, it is grouped not by stylistic categories but physical effects: “To stimulate and enrich your imagination,” “to bring you peace of mind,” “devotion is also a mood.” The group designed to stimulate the imagination, for example, brings together Harry Burleigh’s arrangement of the African American song “By an’ By,” Schumann’s “Träumerei,” and Rachmaninoff ’s “Serenade in B flat minor.”123 The Edison project was followed in the early 1920s by numerous publications on the influence of music in factories and other

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working environments.124 Particularly interesting about all this research is its supposition that music affects work rhythms, based on an assumed linked between auditory and motor imagery. In Germany, psychologist and proponent of psychotechnics Fritz Giese produced a set of recordings to test and train work rhythms in 1926 at the sound department of the Prussian State Library in Berlin (to which I will return in chapter 6).125 Though the recordings were never published, one of them deserves closer attention. Entitled “Number series + words for psychotechnical aptitude testing with persistent interfering stimuli, after Prof. Giese,” it was spoken by the sound department’s director Wilhelm Doegen. Doegen’s words were accompanied by a brass orchestra, cut from another gramophone recording, that blared out the “Graf Zeppelin March.” This 1903 composition by Carl Teike, originally titled “March of the Teutons,” was promoted internationally as the epitome of German military marches, under such heroic titles as “The Conqueror” or “March of the Air Fleet” (figure 5.7 and sound sample).126 The recordings were likely prompted by Giese’s long-standing interest in work rhythms.127 In a book on economic psychology, Giese recounted depth-psychological tests of a similar kind, examining distraction by gramophone music during mechanical packing activities; photographs capture the facial expressions of women working under the influence of jazz music (figure 5.8). “Marches in the older style likewise have a favorable effect on women,” writes Giese. “With songs, they begin to sing along if the songs are popular ones. A substantial impairment in concentration on the work at hand begins as soon as there is a dialogue or an address with speech sounds on the gramophone. The picture on the left reveals the disruptive effect of a dialogue very clearly (carriage of the head with apperceptive listening!).”128 For the purposes of this chapter, it is significant that Giese’s interest was not solely in the question of which type of music is best suited to optimize work performance. The recording he produced in 1926 was designed to train workers to listen to musical records and keep their working rhythms productive despite being distracted by a “dialogue or an address with speech sounds.” In other words, Giese experimented with methods of training his subjects to turn their ear away from the speech sounds surrounding them and concentrate on the rhythm of music alone. There is no reflection in Giese’s studies as to whether the ability to be physically borne along by music varies individually. He does, though, appear to have been aware that music and the spoken word may have equally intense physical effects on the listener because they both provoke motor reactions—an

Figure 5.7: Information sheet for a 1926 recording entitled “Number series + words for psychotechnical aptitude testing with persistent interfering stimuli, after Prof. Giese,” by Fritz Giese and Wilhelm Doegen. The sound recording can be accessed via the database “Sound & Science: Digital Histories,” https://soundandscience .de/node/1036. Lautarchiv, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, LA 636.

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Figure 5.8: Photographs capturing the facial expressions of women working under the influence of spoken-word recordings (left) and jazz music (right) in Giese’s Methoden der Wirtschaftspsychologie (Berlin: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1927), 460.

insight he shared with scholars interested in the aesthetic perception of music, of literature, and of the spoken word on the theatrical stage.

The Co-Creativity of the Theater Audience The 1931 essay “Das theatralische Raumerlebnis” (The theatrical experience of space) by Berlin theater scholar Max Herrmann is something like a postscript to the lively debate on the significance of micromotions in aesthetic perception. Herrmann shifted the debate about individual differences in aesthetic perception to genre-specific differences, stressing the distinctions between the physical effects of a literary work and those of the spoken word on stage. Aesthetic experience in the theater, he postulated, relies crucially on the audience’s “co-creative activity” (mitschöpferische Tätigkeit). This activity consists “in a secret reexperiencing [Nacherleben], in a shadowy recreation of the actor’s work, in reception not so much through the sense of vision as through the sensations of the body, in a covert compulsion to execute the same movements, to produce the same timbre in the throat. Very few spectators are conscious of this process; however, it is often perfectly possible to become conscious of it.”129 The notion of secretly reexperiencing performances draws on attempts by experimental psychologists and phoneticians to have test subjects reconstruct a historical author’s voice. Although Herrmann, who had been trained as a Germanist, knew the work of his colleague Julius Petersen, he did not cite it. This omission may have been partly for personal reasons. Petersen directed the department of German studies in Berlin starting in 1920 and headed the university’s first department of theater studies— Theaterwissenschaft—together with Herrmann starting in 1923.130 But

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professionally, Herrmann, being Jewish, faced restrictions as co-director of the department from the start. In 1933, he was banned from practicing his profession, while Petersen committed to Nazism early on and continued to direct the department alone after Herrmann’s exclusion. It is not unlikely that in 1931, Herrmann was already endeavoring to distance his writings on theater aesthetics from Petersen’s work. A further explanation for the absence of references to Petersen in “Das theatralische Raumerlebnis” may be that Herrmann’s talk of the secret reexperiencing or Nacherleben of events on stage did not evoke the stimulusresponse schemata developed by experimental psychophysiologists including Wundt and Pintner and applied in the humanities by scholars such as Sievers and Petersen. To be sure, much like Sievers and Petersen, Herrmann found that the potential for Nacherleben depends on the quality of the artwork. He also described Nacherleben as a process so sensitive that its effectiveness may be compromised by “an unfavorable emotional contagion of the total audience body.”131 A skillful director must therefore focus on first-rate acting and avoid the spectators being excessively distracted by stage sets and scene changes.132 Herrmann did not, however, follow Sievers and Petersen in their quest for generalization. He argued that there is no such thing as a single, uniform theatrical experience covering all spectators—only experiences in the plural, deriving from the multifariousness of theatrical art and heterogeneity of the audience.133 In this sense, Herrmann considered the Nacherleben of what happens on stage to be an individually variable and extremely personal event, not unlike Stumpf ’s “laryngeal innervations” in music listening. The similarity between Herrmann and Stumpf may stem from their mutual colleague and mentor Wilhelm Dilthey. Max Herrmann studied with Dilthey, describing him as an important teacher and maintaining contact with him later on through the Society for German Literature.134 Dilthey’s influence is apparent in Herrmann’s early work, such as a 1900 study attempting to empathetically enter into “the psyche of the young Goethe.”135 Herrmann’s comments on the secret reexperiencing of events on the stage also evoke Dilthey, who had introduced the notion of Nacherleben as a central methodological category of historical hermeneutics in 1910.136 Dilthey’s concern was not the unconscious physical reaction to art (indeed, he fulminated against the stimulus-response schemata of experimental psychophysiology), but the intellectual reexperiencing of complex symbolic and expressive worlds. According to Dilthey, human beings are born into symbolic worlds, which define their experience. As a result, humans can also create new symbolic worlds and can understand

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and reexperience historical ones.137 Dilthey illustrated this by describing a visit to the theater: “When the curtain goes up and Richard appears, sensitive spectators attending to his words, facial expressions, and movements can re-experience [nacherleben] something that lies outside any possibility in their real life.”138 In Dilthey’s theater, the audience’s empathy is neither with Shakespeare’s Richard nor with the voice of the actor playing him, but with the spirit of fifteenth-century England. Herrmann was seeking a different, not purely intellectual form of historiography. In his Forschungen zur Deutschen Theatergeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (Research on the German theater history of the Middle Ages and Renaissance) of 1914, Herrmann, like Dilthey, still noted the need to reconstruct historical performances and their symbolism in precise detail, but found it most important of all to “breathe life into the paper investigations by transposing them into the practice of one’s own voice, one’s own body, one’s own soul.”139 As time went on, Herrmann became even less faithful to his teacher, partly in his determination to distance himself from every previous method in philosophy and literary studies and to outline a completely separate aesthetics of effect for the theatrical arts, independent of other artistic genres, and partly in his aspiration to open up theater studies to a wide range of research fields within and beyond the humanities.140 For Dilthey, the hermeneutic method of empathy is based on intellectual skills as developed in the humanities; Herrmann envisaged a theater studies that also addresses and applies physical experiences and an aesthetics that bridges the arts and the life sciences. This ambition may explain why “Das theatralische Raumerlebnis” contains no mention of Herrmann’s earlier ventures into literary hermeneutics. Instead, the essay reflects his interest in experimental psychology—the very field that Dilthey had attacked for its orientation on experimental research, but had also supported (albeit unintentionally) in the person of Carl Stumpf.141 In his essay, alongside remarks about the secret physical experiences of the audience, Herrmann made several proposals regarding future research. For example, he suggested studying the impact of theater architecture on the performance of actors, noting that experimental psychology had hitherto paid almost no attention to the effects of space on the human habitus, and discussed possible projects with experimental psychologist Kurt Lewin, a colleague of Stumpf ’s.142 If his teacher Dilthey had invoked symbolic worlds as the guardians of historical continuity, Herrmann— much like Stumpf and, even more so, Abraham—put his faith in the bodily reexperience of theatrical history and theater performance formed by hermeneutics but conceived of psychophysically.

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Bodily Listening as an Abiding Theme Today, empirical aesthetics, a field of interdisciplinary research on aesthetic perception and evaluation that draws on both neurological sciences and humanities, has been flourishing for some years. It has a much longer prehistory, however. The life sciences and humanities around 1900 crossed disciplinary boundaries to pursue questions posed by what was then called “experimental aesthetics.” The emergence of comparably interdisciplinary research initiatives around a century later is often explained by structural similarities between the two eras in terms of their burgeoning neurological sciences, technological innovations, and openness to art-related themes.143 These historical parallels undoubtedly apply to the multidisciplinary interest in movements of the human larynx, lips, tongue, and other organs, movements so hard to perceive yet becoming more measurable around 1900. That interest produced insights into a spectrum of seemingly unrelated themes, from inner and outer speech (Stricker, Ballet) and aesthetic perception more generally (Ribot); to reading behavior (Wundt), speed reading (Pintner), and the art of performing the classics (Sievers, Peters); to the art of singing (García, Seiler), the formation of a “music-infected consciousness” (Stumpf), absolute pitch (Abraham), and musical talent (Schünemann, Seashore); to the rhythm of work (Giese) and theater spectatorship (Herrmann). At first glance, all that research seems to circle around the neuroscientific theories of auditory and motor interaction of the late nineteenth century, each study revealing another facet of how auditory cognition is or is not accompanied by involuntary “muscle feelings.” As this chapter has shown, however, that wide-ranging research was not motivated by an increasingly technologized and thematically open neurological science alone. Equally important was the new field of experimental aesthetics, which integrated and juxtaposed the rising disciplines of experimental psychology with other newly founded humanities disciplines such as literary studies, tone psychology, musicology, and theater studies. The writings on involuntary laryngeal movements of readers, music listeners, and theater audiences discussed in this chapter all share an interest in explaining aesthetic perception through processes of motor memory association, but humanities scholars differed substantially in their responses to associationism in the life sciences. Some scholars followed the sciences in their search for general laws and types of aesthetic perception; others were more interested in individually differing modes of aesthetic experience and judgment. A wide-ranging debate arose within the humanities

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over whether differences were innate (nature), the result of individual education and the conscious and unconscious acquisition of a particular body of knowledge (nurture), or variable depending on the artistic genre concerned, whether music, literature, or theater. In the period around 1900, the relationships between individual humanities disciplines were acquiring their own momentum—defined on the one hand by interdisciplinarity and a network of scholars all seeking to utilize the insights of experimental aesthetics for their own domain, and on the other by methodological innovations driven by legitimatory pressure and subject rivalry inside the arts and humanities. From the 1910s to the 1930s, literary studies, musicology, and theater studies seem to have competed as to which media context (reading books, visiting a concert, or experiencing theatrical space) could most successfully take its recipients by the throat, so to speak, and offer insights into modes of aesthetic perception. In some subject fields in today’s humanities, this competition between disciplines finds echoes. Present-day studies on the aesthetics of affect in theatrical and performance art, for example, frequently return to Max Herrmann’s audience research to argue that the immediate, physical impact on the audience gives theater a special edge over literary drama, music, film, and the visual arts.144 In general, though, such research today is dominated by the field of cognitive psychology, which identifies the phenomenon of empathy—explained by “motor resonance” and the “mirror neuron system”—in all sorts of spectatorship, whether in sports, theater performances, or musical concerts.145 Rather than genre-specific modes of aesthetic perception, the cognitive sciences return to the nature-nurture debate that arose in the late nineteenth century. Remarkably, covert laryngeal activity (now called “subvocalization”) remains an abiding theme in that research, the larynx of test subjects now being measured by means of surface electromyography and nasolaryngoscopy. The results of such apparently objective measurements seem once again to divide opinion. In a series of recent studies, for example, disagreement reigns as to whether skilled musicians do or do not show more intense laryngeal activity than untrained subjects when they imagine a song or sight-read musical notation.146 Views among cognitive psychologists are no less divided in the case of reading research. Some scientists and university counseling services reiterate Rudolf Pintner’s reading theories of the 1910s, telling students that to overcome their slowness, they should suppress the micromotions accompanying their reading by systematically using a pen to guide their eyes down the page until they can change from “subvocalizers” into more

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efficient, visual readers.147 Other reading researchers argue that the “phonological loop system” connecting auditory images (stored in the “the mind’s ear”) with motor images (articulated through subvocal rehearsal by an “inner voice”) is important to a wide range of activities, including reading. They advise against the century-old practices of speed reading, arguing that every subject has an individual reading rate and that suppressing subvocalization may impair text comprehension.148 Present-day research in empirical aesthetics, then, shows striking similarities with the questions, technologies, and methods applied a century ago. Also similar is the choice of the laboratory as a preferred venue for both humanities-based and scientific inquiries into aesthetic perception. Yet the guiding questions in today’s field of empirical aesthetics seem to be posed and framed mainly by the neurological sciences, with humanities scholars often either adopting their agenda wholesale or remaining virtually unheard. One may doubt, therefore, whether the new attention to motor imagery can really be compared with the endeavors around 1900, when most of these research questions were new and scholars in the arts and humanities took the lead in efforts to complicate and enrich them.

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New Brains, Ears, and Tongues Di s c i p l i n e s of L a ng uag e P l a n n i ng

On October 16, 1913, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion premiered at the Hofburg Theater in Vienna. The play leaped to fame with its fictitious experiment in which a professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, tries to teach the flower girl Eliza Doolittle to speak upper-class English. Although the Higgins character was modeled on eminent British phoneticians including Alexander Melville Bell, Alexander J. Ellis, and Henry Sweet, who all shared an interest in the study of dialects and language teaching methods, Shaw believed the experiment he described in Pygmalion would have been too much of an adventure for these scientists. The playwright could only hope that a future phonetics would support everyone troubled with an unfavorable accent to acquire “a new tongue.”1 Writing these lines, Shaw was apparently oblivious to a cluster of new disciplines in the European academic sphere that were already, and rather effectively, trying to reshape the speech of individuals, occupational groups, and entire linguistic communities. This chapter considers those disciplines by investigating a (mainly) Berlin-based network whose adherents developed a series of new programs for speech therapy and language education: phoniatrist Hermann Gutzmann, psychologist Carl Stumpf, linguists Wilhelm Doegen and Theodor Siebs, and musicologist and radio scholar Georg Schünemann. These scientists and scholars were working in periods of significant political change: the German Empire, the First World War, and the Weimar Republic. Yet rather than cleaving to the speech culture of their day, they experimented with new styles of speaking and equipped their test subjects, patients, and clients with previously unheard voices. As they proceeded, they articulated the multiple rationales that guided their work— whether the improvement of social conditions for the disadvantaged and disabled, the rehabilitation of war invalids, the study and redefinition of

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voices worldwide, the formation of a national linguistic identity, or the adaptation of human speech to new media of communication. Despite their varied aims, they all regarded speech training as a tool of language policy and language planning, the latter defined today as “deliberate, although not always overt, future-oriented change in systems of language code and/ or speaking in a societal context.”2 In pursuit of these political goals, the speech education specialists presented in this chapter shared a common point of departure. In epistemological terms, they were all informed by the discovery of the auditory cortex in the 1860s and subsequent insights into its significance for the processing of language and auditory perception as discussed in previous chapters of this book. They conjectured that if the human ability to speak depends on certain language pathways in the brain, it must be possible to gradually alter and improve those pathways by proper and continued training. The resulting training programs thus targeted not speech itself so much as human cognition (and auditory cognition in particular). To speak differently meant thinking differently both with and about the sounds of language. In other words, language use was to become a knowledge technique. To support their training programs, speech therapists and educators at the turn of the twentieth century engaged with a whole array of different media for the recording and playback of human speech and its graphic representation, analysis, stimulation, and tuning. Rather than simply using the technologies available, they adapted and refined what they found to match specific needs. Investigating specific cases of media application in speech education, I confirm a key insight from science and technology studies (STS): every technological medium, when examined in detail, reveals a myriad of possible uses, and technologies prove to be constantly and inherently changeable. Research in STS has drawn attention to the “co-construction of users and technologies,”3 pointing out the ways in which particular consumers or “instrumental communities” may reject the expected use of a technical device completely, domesticate it for their own purposes, exploit the full range of its affordances for alternative purposes, or even contribute to the reconfiguration of whole technologies.4 Similar situations can be identified in Berlin between around 1880 and 1930, when researchers used the sound technologies available in the city but modified them to fit their own social, political, and artistic programs. Some of their speech education methods attracted great public attention and exerted far-reaching influence; others remained little known or entirely unsung. The present chapter looks at both published and unpublished writings, along with the many scientific instruments and sound

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recordings left by the phoniatrists, phoneticians, linguists, psychologists, and radio scholars who formed and informed the tongues of their era.

Phoniatrics and Oralism The decades around 1900 were marked by a heated debate over whether the deaf and hard-of-hearing should be taught to use sign language or oral speech.5 A watershed in that debate was the Milan Conference—the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf, held in Italy in 1880, whose mainly hearing participants declared oral education (“oralism”) to be superior to sign-language education (“manualism”), leading to the abandonment of signed languages in most schools in Europe and the United States and the establishment of the “pure oral method” in deaf education.6 Although the decision remained disputed, it was not until one hundred years later that the sign languages of deaf citizens were declared to be legitimate languages, “equal to those of the hearing majority.”7 At the turn of the twentieth century, a great many physicians and speech educators still fully supported the Milan resolutions, convinced that the vocabulary of sign language was unacceptably narrow and impoverished compared to oral language. Among the proponents of oralism was Hermann Gutzmann, a Berlin physician who had worked on speech disorders ever since writing his dissertation on stuttering in 1887. In that dissertation, Gutzmann mainly summarized the achievements of his father, Albert Gutzmann, a teacher at Berlin’s first municipal “school for deaf-mutes,” who had developed some initial methods for curing speech disorders and teaching the deaf and hard-of-hearing.8 Building on his father’s methods, Hermann Gutzmann became a pioneer of a discipline that would later be called phoniatrics. Soon after obtaining his medical degree, he established a private clinic for voice and speech disorders in the Zehlendorf district of Berlin. This clinic, the first of its kind in the city, was affiliated with the local medical polyclinic in 1907 and merged five years later with the otolaryngology department of Berlin’s university hospital, the Charité (figures 6.1a and 6.1b).9 Gutzmann was head of the department until he died in 1922 from a sepsis said to have been caused by accidentally pricking his finger on a phonograph needle. All his life, Gutzmann experimented with the phonograph and many other devices for the purposes of speech therapy, always seeking to give his patients a new tongue. Before I turn to Gutzmann’s use and invention of these therapeutic tools, it is important to note that they resulted from his bold combination of insights drawn from two separate fields of

Figures 6.1a and 6.1b: Hermann Gutzmann (seated third from the left, front row) at the otolaryngology department of the Charité (figure 6.1a) and, far right, during a therapeutic session with a young girl (figure 6.1b). The undated photographs, now lost, were part of the private collection of Gutzmann’s grandson Hans Gutzmann. They are shown in Heinz Zehmisch, “Die Gutzmanns.” Lecture held during a commemorative event at the Berlin Charité in memory of Hermann Gutzmann sen. on January 29, 2005.

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contemporary research: phonetics and neurophysiology. Based on recent work in both fields, Gutzmann concluded that it was possible to change his patients’ vocal articulation and that, to do so, he must gradually change their “mental world”—their linguistic knowledge and power to imagine new ways of moving their tongue.

Intervening in Vocal Articulation The human voice, Hermann Gutzmann observed in an 1899 article, can err in many ways, affected by what he called hypsotony or bathotony (speaking at too high or too low a pitch), politony (with too variable a pitch), monotony or oligotony (with too invariable a pitch), or other speech impairments.10 How, though, should speech therapists correct these “abnormalities”? What kind of voice, which pitch range and vocal level is appropriate for each patient? Gutzmann noted that speech sounds are highly mobile; they vary both regionally and individually and depend to a great extent on social background, age, mood, and other factors. Attempts to define the correct tonal course of speech in scientific terms thus posed great challenges. Recent work by phoneticians on the “tonal accents” that characterize the pronunciation of certain phonemes, words, or sentences in the German language seemed of little practical use for speech therapy.11 Instead, Gutzmann advised his speech therapist colleagues to determine their patients’ “phonetic zero point” (phonetischer Nullpunkt), understood as the pitch level that an individual generally adopts when speaking in a steady and calm voice.12 He also suggested working with approximate pitch ranges for females and males of different ages as ascertained by the Kiel phonetician Eduard Paulsen.13 In his search for valid parameters in speech education, Gutzmann additionally drew on Hermann von Helmholtz’s theory of vowels. Through experimentation, Helmholtz had found that each vowel consists of a fundamental tone and several harmonic overtones produced in the larynx.14 But whereas Helmholtz thought each vowel is characterized by just one or two partials of absolute pitch, which arise in the larynx and are then enhanced in the oral cavity,15 Gutzmann argued that a “human-like voice” is composed of many partials, and its euphony depends on the proper guidance of the “laryngeal sound” through the oral cavity.16 To improve that guidance was the task of speech therapists. Gutzmann further compared his work to that of the “interference apparatus” introduced to phoneticians by Eduard Sauberschwarz in 1895 (figure 6.2).17 This device made it possible to analyze and modify the compound struc-

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Figure 6.2: For his 1895 experiment with the interference apparatus, Sauberschwarz led the tone through the interference apparatus made of long metal tubes and numerous side tubes. Each side tube measured a quarter wavelength of one particular partial; when the tone moved back and forth through the side tubes, interference with that partial was produced. At the end of the tube, the original tone was either reduced in its tone color or canceled out completely. Eduard Sauberschwarz, “Interferenz-Versuche mit Vocalklängen,” Archiv für die gesammte Physiologie des Menschen und der Thiere 61, no. 1–3 (1895), 13.

ture of a voice by exploiting the phenomenon of destructive interference, the mutual cancellation of two sound waves with the same frequency and amplitude at phase shifts of half a wavelength. Using an interference apparatus, Sauberschwarz destroyed specific partials of a test person’s speech sounds.18 He found that the admixture and strength of particular partials determine whether speech sounds are soft and dull, pleasant and full, empty and hollow, or sharp and clear. For Gutzmann, this finding opened the vista of a speech training that, much like an interference apparatus, could recompose the structure of a patient’s voice by strengthening or reducing particular partials. The importance of the interference apparatus for Gutzmann’s work is underlined by a posthumous edition of his Physiologie der Stimme und

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Sprache (Physiology of the voice and speech) published in 1928 by his son Hermann Gutzmann Jr., also a phoniatrist, in close cooperation with the psychologist Carl Stumpf.19 Since 1913, Stumpf, too, had worked extensively with an interference apparatus at his Berlin Institute of Psychology.20 Rather than for sound analysis alone, he used the apparatus to create synthetic sounds by adding partials produced by organ pipes and feeding them in through the side tubes of the apparatus.21 The 1928 edition of Physiologie der Stimme und Sprache cites these experiments by Stumpf to indicate the possibility of creating speech sounds far more beautiful than those produced by humans. If “a synthetic ruby can be identified with certainty by its flawlessness, whereas the real gem always shows gas bubbles or some kind of impurity,”22 Hermann Gutzmann Sr.’s method regarded a patient’s voice much like the synthetic gem. By intervening in the patient’s articulatory movements, it aimed to perfect the grain of his or her voice. Instead of an interference apparatus, however, Gutzmann chose to work with a whole range of other technologies suited to speech education and his method of “neurological gymnastics.”

Neurological Gymnastics In his monograph Das Stottern (On stuttering) of 1898, Gutzmann Sr. criticized medical studies that, since ancient times, have described stuttering as an incurable organic impairment, mental illness, or even a sign of sin.23 To counter these diagnoses, Gutzmann claimed to have examined more than two thousand stutterers. While he did discover physical dispositions in some of them, and slight abnormalities in, especially, the respiratory and speech organs, most of the stuttering he observed seemed to have had accidental causes: shocks, injuries, psychological trauma, fever and illness, inappropriate language education, or childhood neglect.24 To investigate stuttering, Gutzmann used a pneumograph. Attached to the client’s chest and waist, the device was additionally connected to a kymograph (a clockwork-driven rotating drum) that transcribed every inhalation and exhalation onto soot-blackened paper. This method made it possible to detect spasms in the organs of breathing—spasms that, Gutzmann was convinced, ultimately result from dysfunctions in the human brain: “Stuttering is a spastic neurosis of muscular coordination. And all these spasms are nothing other than a sign of a deficiency in the brain’s mastery over the musculature.”25 Gutzmann’s claims drew mainly on the work of psychologist Adolf Kussmaul, whose eminent Die Störungen der Sprache (“Disturbances of Speech,” 1877) he reissued with a new commentary in 1910 (on Kussmaul,

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see also chapters 2 and 4).26 Like Kussmaul, Gutzmann supposed that human speech depends largely on language faculties in the brain, but that although basal memory centers exist, the paths of association between them are highly plastic and constantly modified through practice, the aging process, and disease. Language disorders, he argued, thus mainly result from underutilized or blocked memory and association capacities in the cerebral system. But localizing the “source of stuttering” in a person’s brain is not as easy as detecting spasms in the organs of breathing, because the affection may result from various different dysfunctional “language pathways” (Sprachbahnen) between the relevant cerebral centers.27 To illustrate the complexity of these language pathways, Gutzmann added yet another schema to the existing literature on aphasia and language processing, marking the directions of pathways of language acquisition, learning to read and write, fluent speech, and so on (figures 6.3a and 6.3b). Although it seemed impossible to localize the nidus of speech disorders, Gutzmann considered it perfectly possible to cure them through proper speech training or, as he preferred to call it, “Nervengymnastik” (neurological gymnastics).28 This concept echoes nineteenth-century vocal art; professional and lay singers at the time believed the singing voice can be gradually perfected by means of “vocal gymnastics” and “vocal hygiene” (chapter 5). Gutzmann’s “neurological gymnastics,” however, were not limited to the vocal organs alone but embraced the entire physiological process of speaking as steered and controlled by the brain. In his view, speech therapy entailed ameliorating problems in a patient’s pathways with the aim of changing the long and ramified routes by which they think with speech sounds. To achieve that goal, Gutzmann experimented with a wide range of therapeutic technologies.

Technologies of Speech Education The Gutzmann papers held at the Humboldt University in Berlin include an inventory of instruments used by Gutzmann in the Charité outpatient clinic for voice and speech disorders between around 1907 and 1922 for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Among other items, the inventory includes siren disks, conical zinc resonators and cylindrical resonators, a portable tonometer, a “Gutzmann tuning fork apparatus and two extra forks,” a dictaphone, an acoustic funnel, a microscope for phonograph cylinders, a kymograph, and a laryngograph.29 Gutzmann’s forays into the design and use of these instruments served his aim of refining his patients’ sense of the sound of speech and of the numerous physical micromotions involved in the process of speaking.

Figure 6.3a and 6.3b: Gutzmann’s sketch of human “language pathways.” Line 1 shows the connection between the ear and the auditory center in the brain (I), line 2 the motor speech pathway, line 3 the optical pathway, line 4 the kinesthetic pathways responsible for all the micromotions involved in speech production, and line 5 the pathway responsible for the bodily movements of writing. Gutzmann’s formulas explain how the brain centers and lines work together in speech acquisition (Sprechenlernen), learning to read (Lesenlernen), and other linguistic abilities. Sketch and formulas from Hermann Gutzmann, Das Stottern: Eine Monographie für Aerzte, Pädagogen und Behörden (Frankfurt am Main: J. Rosenheim, 1898), 245, 246.

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According to Gutzmann, even the most hard-of-hearing should be provided with what he called “teaching through the ear” (Unterricht durchs Ohr).30 Almost all those with residual hearing, he believed, are able to heighten their sense of pitch and loudness and to achieve an awareness of voice regulation through “listening exercises” that target their ears, brains, and tongues.31 Concretely, Gutzmann asked patients with hearing and speech impairments to repeatedly pronounce a phoneme at a certain pitch level while he exposed them to sounds generated by some of the instruments listed in the Charité inventory. He used tuning forks, tonometers, siren disks, and all sorts of whistles to gradually fine-tune his patients’ awareness of pitch levels. From an early stage, Gutzmann additionally developed diagnostic and therapeutic methods based on phonography.32 In 1902, having worked with the technology for almost a decade, he reported that sound recording was particularly suited for making patients aware of lateral lisps, stammering, and so on. He advised regular use of phonography as a way of offering patients a mechanically objective picture of their condition and documenting their progress: “In certain speech disorders, this monitoring of progress during treatment is of significant value for the patients’ morale.”33 In another 1902 publication, Gutzmann recommended phonographic exercises to help patients adopt different styles of speaking. Words spoken onto the cylinder by the physician, or ideally by several physicians, should be played back as often as required, always in the same manner. The speed and pitch of the original words may be modulated and adapted to a speaker’s abilities. To ensure that the recorded sounds sink gradually into the patient’s memory, they must be repeated first in a whisper, then in an increasingly loud voice.34 In the 1910s and 1920s, Gutzmann continued to use dictation machines, an Edison Home Phonograph, and an Excelsior phonograph in what he alternately called listening exercises and “teaching through the ear,” always considering the therapeutic requirements of the specific case.35 Two Parlographs produced by the Lindström company in 1913, both of which belonged to Gutzmann, are held today in the Museum of Medical History, Berlin.36 In addition to commercially available phonograph technology, the physician reworked devices and designed accessories as needed. There is even a patent for a phonograph resonator mentioning Gutzmann’s name. Patent documentation filed with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office in 1923 refers to the 1917 invention of a wooden resonator that can be attached directly to the phonograph needle in order to generate “sonorous, warm, and soft tones of pleasant timbre.”37 The 1923 application is for resonance boxes in various playful forms that enable

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sound to be reproduced “in perfect purity of tone and a fine timbre” (figure 6.4). The patent holder was not Gutzmann himself, but German American instrument manufacturer Hans Hohner, who obviously saw a market for the invention.38 The music industry, then, also profited from Gutzmann’s invention, even though he worked on resonators less for musical purposes than as a way of enhancing intelligibility during speech therapy. Around the same time, Gutzmann also found a way to take the phonograph beyond its function as a playback technology. In an experiment, he visualized the grooves of a sound recording. He prepared wax-covered cardboard records with a mixture of alcamine, turpentine, and alcohol so that their surface turned red, while every detail of the vertical recording became visible in pale yellow; the grooves were subsequently converted into a wave form by a Martens-Leppin photographic capsule connected to a kymograph.39 The resulting phono-photograms, Gutzmann wrote, allowed him to confront the hard-of-hearing and the deaf with visual evidence of their speech disorders. In this way, the technology eased the shift from aural to visual methods of speech education. Bent on expanding the toolbox of neurological gymnastics, Gutzmann additionally drew up a program for the “neuromuscular education” (neuromuskuläre Erziehung) of people with speech impairments.40 He considered it possible to compensate for speech disorders with a well-trained motor consciousness—that is, a profound knowledge of the usually involuntary movements involved in speech production.41 Of the speech organs monitored, Gutzmann paid most attention to the larynx—as we have seen (chapter 5), an organ of much more general interest among scholars and scientists at the turn of the twentieth century. He evaluated the laryngographs marketed at the time and combined several devices to record vertical and horizontal laryngeal movements simultaneously.42 Gutzmann’s own laryngograph was certainly not the most comfortable to wear, but he used it without restraint to detect laryngeal spasms and strong vocal fluctuations in his patients’ articulation (figure 6.5). A further method to improve what Gutzmann disrespectfully called the “ugly voice of the deaf-mute” was “training in vibration control.”43 Here, patients were asked to speak while feeling with their fingers the vibrations in their larynx in order to enhance their awareness of laryngeal movements.44 Collaborating with mechanic Johann Ganske, Gutzmann also designed an easy-to-handle kymograph based on the commercially available “Zwaardemaker Registrierapparat.” The new instrument could simultaneously register the movements of the larynx, lips, tongue, lower and upper jaw, and respiration.45 Together, the inscriptions made it possible to visu-

Figure 6.4: Patent drawings for Gutzmann’s phonograph resonator in the form of cylinders, pyramids, cones, spheres, stringed instruments, or even busts of famous composers. Canadian Intellectual Property Office, Patent CA 233764, 1923-08-21. Scan provided by Canadian Patent Database, www.ic.gc.ca/opic-cipo/cpd/eng/patent/ 233764/summary.html.

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Figure 6.5: Laryngograph constructed by Gutzmann in 1908 for the graphical recording of unconscious laryngeal movements during speech. Hermann Gutzmann, Physiologie der Stimme und Sprache, 2nd ed. (Braunschweig: Vieweg und Sohn, 1928), 166.

ally apprehend different articulatory movements at once, and therefore to correct them more effectively. Gutzmann’s methods, based on the phonograph and his many inscription and stimulation devices, testify to a creative development and utilization of technology in pursuit of his own objectives, however dubious these may have been. His neurological gymnastics did not genuinely intend to immediately cure a patient’s speech disorder.46 What interested him was the process by which changing the language pathways forced the patient to gradually think differently with speech sounds (teaching through the ear) and about speech sounds (visual and neuromuscular training). This change of thinking was guided and largely defined by the normalizing choices that the physician made about his patients’ tongues.

Voices for the War There is no doubt that Gutzmann saw his work as political. In 1904, he initiated the first large-scale statistical surveys of childhood speech disorders in Prussia, concerning himself with the social significance of all kinds of speech disorders and their impact on occupational groups including singers, actors, teachers, pastors, lawyers, retailers, artisans, farmers, factory

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workers, army conscripts, and more.47 Hardly anyone suffering from a speech impairment, found Gutzmann, managed to pursue these occupations successfully. “For who will hire a servant suffering even from a mere stammer if he can find plenty of people who speak well?” he had asked in an earlier study. “What businessman will take on a stuttering errand boy if huge numbers of well-spoken boys offer their services? What family will hire a stuttering servant girl or nursery maid and expose its children to the danger of becoming stutterers themselves?”48 Because “every speech disorder is antisocial,” social cohesion made it vital to improve existing “speech hygiene” programs for children and adults across the Prussian state in kindergartens, schools, and all other public institutions.49 Gutzmann succeeded in realizing this wide-ranging humanitarian goal to some extent. His most expansive attempts to perfect human voices, however, were directed at war-disabled people during the First World War. Not long after the war began, the rising number of invalids led to several ambitious rehabilitation projects in Germany. Gutzmann sensed that the time was ripe for a therapy program for war-injured military personnel who had lost the ability to speak, and when a convention of the Federation of German Deaf-Mute Teachers met in the upper house of the Prussian parliament in 1915, he spoke on the topic of “voice and speech disorders in wartime and their treatment.” In this lecture, Gutzmann addressed the hazards of war—the bullets injuring the head and neck, the grenades, the explosions leaving patients with external wounds and damage to their central and peripheral nervous systems. The consequences, he explained, were aphasia, vocal cord paralysis, aphonia, articulation problems, or serious difficulties in swallowing. Gutzmann also discussed “internal wounds” such as cerebral concussion, ruptured blood vessels, and internal bleeding that often result in severe aphasia, dysarthria and dysphasia, and phonasthenia.50 Even without an organic injury, experiences of shock can sometimes cause functional speech disorders, especially among soldiers with a predisposition: those who had experienced mental illness before going to war. Trying to get to the root of the trouble, Gutzmann once again turned first to the brain. He precisely diagnosed all war-related speech disorders and prescribed exercise-based treatments carefully tailored to the individual clinical picture in the shape of breathing, voice, speech, and, most importantly, cognitive exercises, which together would rehabilitate and strengthen the voices of the war-wounded.51 Obviously, Gutzmann was using the wartime setting to expand the reach of his therapeutic methods and, quite literally, to reshape voices for the war. To prove his method’s

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efficacy, he closed his lecture by playing a recording of an artillery captain who had suffered laryngeal nerve paralysis. After Gutzmann’s therapy made him fit to fight again, the captain was killed in action—“yet his voice lives on, and will sound out clearly through this whole auditorium thanks to the simple treatment I have described.”52 Gutzmann’s rather morbid 1915 lecture to an audience of military doctors of the Berlin army medical offices and of the Ministry of War won him support for the funding of a speech rehabilitation program based on his logopedic methods.53 At the time of the lecture, Gutzmann had already treated more than two hundred war injuries; by the end of the war, he had seen over a thousand patients.54 He looked after them at his outpatient clinic for voice and speech disorders in the otolaryngology department of the Charité hospital.55 At the outbreak of war, Gutzmann additionally converted his private practice in Zehlendorf into an approximately thirty-bed “military hospital” for soldiers suffering from voice and speech troubles. He lived there with his patients in order to assess their condition more effectively and supervise their neurological gymnastics closely day by day.56 Both clinics grew over the course of the war, helping Gutzmann to make a name for himself by treating the speech of war invalids.

Tricking the Ear Gutzmann was not the only one to benefit from the First World War; the philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf did too. In these times of change, the two men shared an interest in the connections between human thought, techniques of hearing and speaking, and national identity formation and both sought opportunities to intervene in those connections. From 1894 to 1921, Stumpf directed the Institute of Psychology, which grew over the years from a cramped university venue in Berlin’s Dorotheenstrasse to a large laboratory, housed in the City Palace. As outlined in chapter 5, it was there that Stumpf and his colleagues established a novel program for the “laboratory humanities,” adapting experimental methods of the laboratory sciences to the needs of research in psychology, linguistics, musicology, and other humanities disciplines. During the war, equipped with a wide range of research instruments, Stumpf locked himself in his laboratory. “When the guns were thundering outside the city,” he wrote later, “it was all the quieter in the streets and scientific institutes of Berlin. Acoustic observations could be carried out almost as if in a soundproof room, and even whispered sounds could be broken down into their smallest components. Thus it was that in this terrible time I tried,

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little though the general mood encouraged it, to continue scientific work that had been intensively pursued in Germany, especially in the field of phonetics, ever since HELMHOLTZ.”57 More specifically, Stumpf evaluated Helmholtz’s theory of vowels by means of an interference apparatus, the device that Gutzmann also made an important point of reference in his speech training. In addition to the physical analysis and synthesis of speech sounds, Stumpf used the apparatus to study human perception of speech sounds. He wanted to find how much of the upper spectrum of partials can be lost before the gestalt of a speech sound becomes unrecognizable, and how perception varies individually among test subjects.58 Stumpf observed that “psychologically trained observers” proved far better at understanding even when the speech sounds were stripped of certain partials, as did those informed in advance of which sounds they would hear.59 In this work, Stumpf was in part referring back to Hermann Gutzmann, who, in his 1908 paper “Über Hören und Verstehen” (On hearing and understanding), described the phonograph as a “splendid stimulus instrument” for studying human auditory comprehension.60 When investigating the degree to which audition is influenced by prior knowledge, Gutzmann deliberately exploited the poor quality of the phonograph—it had a frequency band of only 1,000 to 5,000 Hz at the time—to confront his subjects with meaningless three-syllable test words. Gutzmann observed that most listeners compensated for the difficulty of understanding by seeking phonetic similarities with a known language or word. Identifying several “laws of sound transposition,” Gutzmann also found that the results varied according to the particular test person—because “even against his will, in the end the listener always inserts the words that are closest to his whole mental world . . . in the place of the nonsense syllables he has heard.”61 Refined young ladies, for instance, thought they had heard French words; a young man in love heard a striking number of girls’ names.62 Effects similar to those produced by Gutzmann’s phonograph, noted Stumpf, could be observed in his own interference apparatus and in experiments with a telephone, whose very restricted frequency range was likewise compensated for by the “human adult’s art of interpreting meaningful and coherent speech.”63 “By the very fact of attuning ourselves to hear German, French, or Italian,” for example, “we exclude numerous possibilities of apprehending what we hear, while other possibilities edge closer.”64 Stumpf concluded that test subjects’ individual attitudes (Einstellungen)—their habits, education, and prior knowledge—had substantial influence on their perception of speech.65

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Although Stumpf was fully aware of his study’s potential for many fields of application, he consistently stressed that his experiments with the interference apparatus and the telephone were directed “not at practical objectives, but at the purely theoretical question of how ‘complex qualities’ arise.”66 This position is striking, given that researchers based in electroacoustics companies conducted similar psychological experiments in the 1920s with explicitly application-oriented goals. Most famous in this respect is the work of Harvey Fletcher and his colleagues at Bell Labs, the laboratory facilities of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). Examining telephone communication, Fletcher found it possible to maintain the intelligibility of a speech sound while filtering out the partials below and above the threshold of human hearing, and less important partials within the range of hearing.67 AT&T made great capital out of these findings. The company reduced the frequency range of telephone speech, enabling the bandwidth of its system to be used more efficiently.68 Recent studies have addressed in detail these entanglements between early psychoacoustic research and signal compression in electroacoustics.69 I recapitulate them here because they reveal how the demarcation between scientific and humanities research on speech sounds became blurred in the 1910s and 1920s, as did the line between pure and applied research. Many endeavors in fields of seemingly pure laboratory research were taken and put to work in the telecommunications industry. And both sides of the “great divide” were fascinated by the deceivability of the human ear. In Stumpf ’s inquiries into the gestalt of a speech sound and Fletcher’s studies on the compressibility of acoustic information, the listener proved able to comprehend vocal utterances despite the limited frequency range of sounds transmitted by the phonograph, interference apparatus, or telephone. Unconsciously, listeners filled in what they thought they heard or were instructed to hear.70 The listener was dupable. Without stretching the point too far, we might conclude that it was easy to tell the dupable listeners of the early twentieth century how to perceive, interpret, and internalize the vocal innovations proposed by the scientific and humanities-based projects around them. The phoniatrist Gutzmann used these effects to make his patients trust the voices he presented to them in his aural education sessions; the philosopher Stumpf initiated a different phonographic project to train and trick his audiences’ ears.

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New Ears for New Voices In 1900, Stumpf ’s Institute of Psychology became home to the Berlin Phonogram Archive, which soon held several thousands of recordings of music and speech samples collected by scholars and travelers around the globe, especially those pursuing colonial business. In the archive’s early phase, Stumpf was rather blunt about the motivations that had led to its foundation. He called it the scholar’s duty to supplement colonialism’s material exploitation of “new lands” by developing methods for the “scientific exploitation” of their “nature and native culture.”71 On the other hand, he emphasized the advantages of the phonograph over traditional notation systems on the grounds that the phonograph allowed a mechanical, seemingly objective study of “exotic musical systems” without “Europeanizing them in a scientifically inadmissible way.”72 This conviction did not, however, stop Stumpf deploying the recordings to construct a hierarchical theory of musical systems in which the modern European system took pride of place.73 The Phonogram Archive envisaged a similar project for the collection of “dying dialects” from all over the world.74 In Stumpf ’s view, both projects required a retraining of the scholarly ear. Many of the Phonogram Archive’s recordings, he noted, at first seem “abnormal, unnatural, and therefore unpleasant or even disgusting,” but then they open the scholar’s horizon and help him understand the nature of previously unheard sound cultures.75 Although Stumpf ’s early forays into sound archiving date from around the same time as his psychological studies on the suggestibility of the human listener, he himself never drew any parallels between the two strands of his research. Retrospectively, though, we may say that Stumpf did more than introduce German ears to the voices recorded and stored by the Phonogram Archive. He created new ears for new voices, resulting in new linguistic and musical taxonomies. To be sure, Stumpf ’s collaborators at the Archive, musicologists Otto Abraham and Erich von Hornbostel, held slightly more ambivalent views. In 1904, they used the phonograph to study “exotic musicians,” initially not otherwise specified, who were residing in or traveling through the city. They investigated these musicians’ sense of intervals and their memory of tones, asked them to tune their own instruments, and confronted them with Western musical intervals and tunings in order to spell out differences. Though problematic in its imperialist gesture, this work seems to have been motivated by a critical awareness of the “delicate issue of cultural and psychological characteristics of race” and a rather nuanced interest in finding criteria to measure and appreciate non-Western musical skills.76

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In the subsequent years, this critical awareness gave way to a harsher stance. Stumpf ’s plan of collecting musical cultures previously unheard in Europe was pursued in collaboration with the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, founded by the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art, and Education during the First World War. Already director of the Institute of Psychology, Carl Stumpf was now appointed to direct the Commission as well. With a group of leading linguists, anthropologists, and musicologists, his task was to collect the voices of prisoners of war interned in German camps between 1915 and 1918. Many of the resulting recordings served preservationist and colonialist interests, tied to the objective of systematically investigating the world’s languages, dialects, and musics. In this project, internees were rarely allowed to speak spontaneously into the gramophone horn. Their voices were taken captive by the specifications of the Phonographic Commission, which instructed them to articulate at the top of their voice and recite prescribed anecdotes or stories, prayers, fairy tales, song lyrics, or lists of words and numbers (figure 6.6). Those unable to read were assisted by one of the linguists, who whispered the text into their ears. When it came to analyzing the recordings, the

Figure 6.6: Recording the voice of a British soldier in a prisoner-of-war camp in Göttingen, Germany. To the soldier’s left is Carl Stumpf (holding a manuscript), while Wilhelm Doegen holds the soldier’s neck in place and shows him the text to read aloud (ca. 1915–1918). © Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, inventory number BA 98/93.

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scholarly members of the Phonographic Commission, most of whom were Germans, claimed interpretive sovereignty over these samples of speech from all over the world. The implicit violence of the Phonographic Commission’s work has recently been the subject of several critical studies.77 From today’s perspective, it is clear that the musical and linguistic snapshots produced in the camps only pretended to represent distinct vocal cultures. For the Phonographic Commission, each recording served as pars pro toto for an assumed “indigenous culture.” Any definition from a position of power of an alleged “other” culture is problematic, and much more so the claim that such a culture can be represented by a single sound recording. Commission members told their scholarly audience, and indeed everyone interested in their project, how to listen to and interpret the recordings. This approach in some ways recalls Stumpf ’s experiments with the interference apparatus: in both cases, the listener was “psychologically trained” and informed in advance about how to understand the newly introduced voices and speech sounds. Both projects, furthermore, confirmed Stumpf ’s belief that listening is first and foremost a knowledge technique, the work of the mind’s ear.

Language Planning in Interwar Germany After the war, the efforts of the Phonographic Commission evolved into another large-scale project: the Lautabteilung (sound department) of the Prussian State Library. The Lautabteilung was founded in 1920 by Wilhelm Doegen, a phonetician, specialist in English-language and literature, and former Commission member.78 It built in part on the strategies of longerestablished scientific sound archives such as the Berlin Phonogram Archive, the Phonogram Archive in Vienna set up in 1899, and the Archives de la parole founded in Paris in 1911 (mentioned in chapters 3 and 4). Following a humanistic and historicist impulse to collect linguistic, musical, and cultural data in order to make them available for detailed analysis or for later historiography, those institutions emphasized their encyclopedic and museum-like aspect.79 Through the Lautabteilung, Doegen aimed to carry out an even larger research program exploiting the possibilities offered by phonographic recording. To this end, he successfully brought together Fachmänner (experts) in a great variety of disciplines. The sheer scope of the project takes visible form in the highly ramified organizational chart of the Lautabteilung, drawn in 1929 (figure 6.7). The same chart also reveals the political agenda of the state authorities to which Doegen’s department was officially affiliated in the 1920s.

Figure 6.7: Organizational chart of the sound department (Lautabteilung) of the Prussian State Library, 1929. Archiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU UA), Inst. für Lautforschung, Nr. 1, o. Bl.

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Under point 2, it indicates that the sound department stood squarely in the service of institutions, such as the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, committed to the promotion of German language and culture. Doegen carried the Phonographic Commission’s venture further by not only collecting and defining existing German dialects but also creating recorded material to teach language. Some of the recordings he produced and collected were intended to serve the acquisition of new ears and new tongues in language teaching. A student of renowned English phonetician Henry Sweet, Doegen had first worked as an English teacher in Berlin. He experimented with use of the gramophone in language instruction at an early stage, and from 1909 onward published the world’s first Unterrichtshefte für die selbständige Erlernung fremder Sprachen mit Hilfe der Lautschrift und der Sprechmaschine (Teaching booklets for the independent learning of foreign languages with the aid of phonetic script and the speaking machine). Doegen’s aim was to hone linguistic skills through repeated stimulation by speech samples on gramophone records. “Learning a modern foreign language,” he wrote in 1909, “is possible only if one hears the word spoken or read aloud, again and again in the same way, that is, at a uniform volume, for only thus can the dialectal peculiarities of the foreign language imprint themselves on human hearing.” In addition to phonetic transcription, Doegen extolled the “language learning gramophone record” as the ideal teaching medium because it worked perfectly mechanically, like “a wind-up Englishman, who gives no linguistic explanations, steps down when he has finished talking, . . . speaks fast or slowly to taste, and is at the learner’s disposal at any time and any place.”80 As a language teacher, Doegen drew inspiration from the Hamburgbased experimental educationist Ernst Meumann, who accorded “acoustic memory” a key role in language acquisition. Meumann himself was particularly indebted to previous work on inner speech and the importance of auditory cognition for language processing, and he recommended that teachers present linguistic material acoustically and rhythmically, ideally by means of a phonograph.81 But there are also striking parallels between Doegen’s proposed use of the phonograph for language acquisition and phoniatrist Hermann Gutzmann’s idea of curing speech disorders through constant replaying of phonogram recordings. Also reminiscent of Gutzmann’s work is the fact that Doegen started by addressing the particular requirements of his teaching objectives, tinkering with or completely redesigning the gramophone technology of his day (figure 6.8). Doegen collaborated with the Odeon company in Berlin to improve the “glyphic” gramophone recording technique (lateral

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Figure 6.8: A schoolboy studies a foreign language using the “Doegen-OdeonLautapparat,” promoted in Wilhelm Doegen’s Jahrbuch des Lautwesens (Berlin: Lehner Vertriebsges. m. b. H., 1930), 43.

recording—“Berliner Schrift”—using a cut sapphire or ruby). He hoped to deploy this technique for recording the spoken word, more specifically for the “faithful reproduction of unvoiced and voiced consonants.”82 In 1924, Doegen also patented the Lauthalter, or “sound-holder,” a mechanical device that enabled repeated playback and analysis of short sequences of a gramophone recording—better for imprinting the pronunciation of a foreign language deeply and securely in the student’s mind (figure 6.9).83

Standard Pronunciation As director of the Lautabteilung, Doegen published a new series of records for teaching French and English: the Kulturkundliche Lautbücherei (Ethnological sound library) of 1925 and 1926.84 Originally, the series was to include German-language teaching records produced in 1925 by Doegen and linguist Theodor Siebs. Never published but still preserved today, these records convey an impression of how the two linguists intended German listeners to adapt their pronunciation to new standards in the 1920s.85 The records were based on Siebs’s manual Die Deutsche Bühnenaussprache (German stage pronunciation), first published in 1898 and reprinted numerous times throughout the twentieth century. Siebs was a dialect researcher who taught medieval studies in Greifswald, in north-

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Figure 6.9: Drawing of the Lauthalter patented by Doegen in May 1924. © Deutsches Historisches Museum/S. Ahlers. Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, inventory number Do2 98/2222.

east Germany. He was certainly not the first to try to regulate German pronunciation—efforts of this kind in the German lands go back to the Reformation and the introduction of lectures in German at early modern universities.86 However, Germany lacked a generally accepted model for pronunciation standards. In Britain, the dialect of the privately educated upper classes had set the standard for English pronunciation rules since the late nineteenth century;87 in France, the dialect of the Parisian elite enjoyed model status from around 1900.88 Because the German regions had a high degree of autonomy until the late nineteenth century, no German dialect achieved that kind of preeminence. In search of a model pronunciation, German language reformers thus oriented themselves on the German spoken at universities, on theater stages, and in churches.89 In April 1898, Siebs created a committee to draw up German pronunciation rules based on the language spoken on stage. The committee met at the Royal Theater in Berlin (today’s Konzerthaus) and included delegates from the Association of the German Stage, along with the renowned

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Leipzig phonetician Eduard Sievers, the Austrian philologist Karl Luick, and several others. In fact, Siebs had only a limited interest in the knowledge of pronunciation that circulated among his illustrious colleagues. Instead, his contributions were mainly derived from his own visits to the theater. As he explained, “I have collected a wealth of material by attending serious drama and comedies of manners and phonetically noting down all the pronunciations of ‘e’ for hours on end.” Siebs then “carefully considered all the various possibilities of regulation, and in the committee we debated this point for many hours.”90 To avoid the impression that a single academic had been making more or less subjective decisions on the euphony of stage pronunciation, the first, 1898 edition of Die Deutsche Bühnenaussprache lists numerous objective research procedures underlying its decisions. It explains that the German-speaking area was divided into its three linguistic regions (Low German, Central German, Upper German); complex algorithmic procedures, described in detail, were then used to discover the majority pronunciations used in theaters.91 The rulebook thus claims to be an archive of the actual spoken practice of the German stage, as well as presenting the results of a “scientific” algorithm to decide upon controversial points. Yet Siebs’s original account of the committee’s procedure make it clear that he and his colleagues quite simply invented a new standard pronunciation. Despite the evident flaws in his procedure, the German Stage Association recommended Siebs’s opus, nowadays known simply as “The Siebs,” to all theaters and drama schools immediately on its first publication.92 After some hesitation, “The Siebs” was also recommended for use in school teaching across Germany, and for the thirteenth edition in 1922, Siebs could triumphantly expand the title: German Stage Pronunciation: Standard Language.93 When Siebs and Doegen began work on their German-language teaching records in 1925, Die Deutsche Bühnenaussprache was already a well-established pronunciation handbook, but the fresh collaboration convinced Siebs to abandon the theater as a disseminator of his pronunciation rules. He now turned to a new medium—the gramophone. The Lautarchiv in Berlin holds eleven recordings for teaching German vowel groups such as o–ö–u–ü, consonants, and diphthongs, which were produced to document Siebs’s rules and train the listeners’ pronunciation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Siebs himself took on the role of the model speaker. On a three-minute teaching record for the vowel o, for instance (figure 6.10 and sound sample), he demonstrates that a long o must not be pronounced as o-u (“Ro–o–ose, nicht Ro–use”), while a short o needs to be rounded correctly (“Gott, nicht Gatt”). In a rhythmic succession, he then recites a series of words including o vowels (“Lorbeer, Vorteil, Sonne,

Figure 6.10: Information sheet for a sound recording on December 4, 1925, by Siebs. The recordings of Siebs’s “standard pronunciation” of the vowels o, ö, u, ü and the diphthongs ai, ei, au, äu, eu is held at the Lautarchiv, LA 567, HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin. The sound recording and an information sheet are available via the database “Sound & Science: Digital Histories,” https://soundandscience.de/node/ 1060.

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fordern, Doktor”). Repeated playback of the records would, it was hoped, make the listeners speak in Siebs’s own tongue. Financial troubles at the Lautabteilung in Berlin prevented the recordings of Die Deutsche Bühnenaussprache from being published. An extensive correspondence between Doegen and Siebs, now held in the archives of the Humboldt University, shows that Siebs spent the three years from 1927 to 1929 pushing for their publication and pressuring Doegen with all sorts of strategies.94 This dogged campaign reveals Siebs’s discomfort at having produced a solitary archival item instead of repeating his previous success by creating educational records that would be sold to and applied by the masses. The high hopes that Doegen and Siebs placed in these teaching records are nevertheless telling. The two linguists aspired to reach the entire German nation, creating a collective auditory memory of Siebs’s pronunciation rules and training all Germans to think with the same language sounds. In other words, soon after the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure proposed a new approach to linguistics attending to the “totality of word patterns” stored in the brains of a linguistic community as a whole (see chapter 3),95 his fellow linguists Doegen and Siebs sought to change and standardize those word patterns among all speakers of the German language.96 Eager to disseminate standard German among non-German listeners as well,97 Doegen and Siebs contributed to Weimar efforts to reestablish German as a “world language,” which had motivated the founding of institutions such as the Deutsche Akademie (the forerunner of the Goethe Institute) in 1923 and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1925. These bodies promoted the teaching of German as a foreign language, utilizing methods and media developed in experimental pedagogy.98 In the end, the only reason Siebs gave up his plan to publish his German teaching records was the rise of radio, a new medium that promised to deliver at last the mass impact he had been seeking from the start. Without hesitating, Siebs renamed his pronunciation rulebook Rundfunkaussprache (Radio pronunciation, 1931). “The broadcaster is dedicated not to just a locally restricted circle, but to the general public, to the whole of the folk community [völkische Gemeinschaft],” he wrote. “One must never forget that radio can exert a powerful effect on its listeners, and the nature of its language alone makes it a significant cultural force.”99 Siebs’s words echo his era’s discourse on the collective impact of radio on people’s minds and reveal his aim of pervading the ether with his pronunciation rules.100 Endeavors to promote and standardize a national language by means

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of gramophones and radio could be found in many European countries at the time,101 but Siebs’s work in Germany must be seen as sliding into Nazi propaganda. Although he stopped publishing new editions of his pronunciation guide in 1931, Siebs worked energetically for the application of his rules in Nazi-governed theater, radio, and school teaching. He was the director of the ethnology section of Alfred Rosenberg’s Nazi “Combat League for German Culture,” head of Germany’s second-biggest university department of German studies in Breslau, and a senator of the Deutsche Akademie.102 In the exaggerated, increasingly standardized style of enunciation used by Nazi officials in school, university, theater, radio, and television settings, therefore, we see—at least in part—Siebs’s rules taking hold.

Inventing Radio Speech Contemporaneously with Theodor Siebs’s early interest in radio as a means of language planning, scholars from various disciplines and political standpoints started to reflect more generally on the art of speaking for radio and on ways of constructing a training program for radio announcers and radio actors along the lines of existing methods in speech therapy and language teaching. One site of such reflections was the radio laboratory (Funkversuchsstelle, later known as Rundfunkversuchsstelle), which opened its doors in May 1928 at the Academy of Music in Berlin. The radio lab’s initiator was Leo Kestenberg, head of the music department at the Prussian Central Institute for Education and Instruction. Kestenberg, a social democrat, campaigned for the musical education of broad segments of the population while also supporting the Weimar Republic’s artistic avant-garde.103 These lofty aims being far beyond the reach of the still poor quality of broadcasting in the 1920s, Kestenberg advocated a research center dedicated to developing a new radio music and way of speaking for radio.104 Before I turn to the radio lab’s work in creating new voices for radio, it should be mentioned that all its research was in the hands of the music educator Georg Schünemann, deputy director of the Academy of Music, who had been appointed by Kestenberg to lead the radio lab.105 Several fine studies have analyzed Schünemann’s role in the Weimar musical avantgarde and his promotion of a new interdisciplinarity between engineers and musicians at the lab—exemplified most famously by the cooperation between former telegraph engineer Friedrich Trautwein, composer Paul Hindemith, and Hindemith’s student Oskar Sala. They invented the Trautonium, marketed soon after by Telefunken: an electronic musical instru-

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ment facilitating microtonal music and prefiguring modern synthesizers that could be directly plugged into a radio amplifier.106 As a professor of musicology, however, Schünemann was determined to tie radio research not only to technology and art, but also to expertise in the humanities, whose status in the academic landscape had been strengthened across the board by this point. The role of the humanities in Schünemann’s project becomes particularly apparent when we consider the Berlin lab’s work on radio speech. As a well-preserved archive at the University of the Arts in Berlin reveals,107 phoneticians, linguists, psychologists, and language educators were involved in the lab’s research on radio speech to a remarkable extent, working hand in glove with acoustic engineers. Discussing these collaborations, Schünemann made explicit reference to his long-time mentor Carl Stumpf, a key player in the emergence of the “laboratory humanities” of the time. After studying with Stumpf at the University of Berlin, Schünemann had been a researcher at Stumpf ’s Institute for Psychology in 1906 and a member of the Phonographic Commission during the First World War. When Stumpf ’s Phonogram Archive was acquired by the Prussian state in 1923, Schünemann managed to formally transfer it to the Academy of Music until 1934.108 In parallel, Schünemann assisted Doegen’s sound department at the Prussian State Library as an adviser on music. He would have liked to absorb this project into the Academy of Music as well but had to make do with loose cooperation instead.109 Inspired by colleagues in the humanities who attended closely to available recording and communications technologies and adjusted them to fit their own research objectives, Schünemann’s radio lab took an important step further than Stumpf and Doegen: its research agenda was exclusively application-oriented. This aspect of Schünemann’s undertaking drew inspiration from the many laboratories of applied electroacoustics established across Germany after the First World War in technical universities, political institutions, and industrial corporations to provide firmer scientific footing for inventions such as the telephone, microphone, and loudspeaker and to optimize them for the German market.110 Among these institutions was the Heinrich Hertz Institute for Oscillation Research (HHI), affiliated with the Technical University Berlin, which was founded to conduct largescale research in electroacoustics. Based next door to the HHI in BerlinCharlottenburg, Schünemann envisioned his laboratory as a project of similarly ambitious scope for broadcasting. According to Schünemann, around three thousand people were involved in the radio lab in its first year, including musicians, actors, play-

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wrights, journalists, electroacousticians, phoneticians, speech educators, and psychologists.111 In addition to working on radio music, they cooperated in two, necessarily interconnected, fields of research on speaking for radio: the improvement of radio technology and the creation of a new art of speaking on air.112

Improvements in Radio Technology In one of his essays on the Berlin radio lab, Schünemann contended that any systematic understanding of radio speech and its often unwanted modification by microphones, telephone lines, amplifiers, headphones, and speakers depended on the precise analysis of speech tone patterns.113 This argument placed the lab’s work on broadcast speech firmly in the tradition of Stumpf ’s study Die Sprachlaute (Speech sounds, 1926), itself the outcome of almost three decades of work at the Institute of Psychology in Berlin. Unlike Stumpf with his long-term, pure research on speech sounds, however, Schünemann aimed to produce immediately applicable knowledge and technologies. One of the radio lab’s prime projects in this respect was to develop a search tone method for testing microphones. Martin Grützmacher, an acoustician from the national telegraphy department, and Erwin Meyer, head of acoustics at the HHI and a teacher at the radio lab, basically transformed the experiments that Stumpf had conducted with his interference apparatus from 1913 into an electric circuit.114 In a 1927 study, Grützmacher first worked out a “new method of sound analysis” by converting the sound signal (already a frequency mix) into electrical voltage, then using an “interference buzzer” to modulate search frequencies with alternating currents—known in electroacoustics today as a search tone—onto the incoming signal (figures 6.11a and 6.11b).115 Through rectification and amplification, a new combination tone was formed from one partial of the incoming signal and one search tone. By subtracting the search voltage from this combination tone, it was possible to discover the amplitude and frequencies of the signal’s partial. Working from these experiments, Meyer integrated a carbon microphone into Grützmacher’s circuit arrangement. Meyer realized that when search frequencies were closely adjacent, they became an interference factor themselves and produced distortions in the microphone.116 He followed up by experimenting with search frequencies in the form of a beat produced by two rapidly alternating primary tones, p and q. Oscillation impedances arose analogously in the microphone and, in a rapid sequence, were juxtaposed with the next impedance, resulting in not two subsequent

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Figures 6.11a and 6.11b: Carl Stumpf’s experimental setting from Die Sprachlaute: Experimentell-phonetische Untersuchungen nebst einem Anhang über Instrumentalklänge (Berlin: Springer, 1926), 44 (Figure 6.11a), using the principle of destructive interference, is modeled on Sauberschwarz’s interference apparatus (see Figure 6.2). Stumpf’s setting, in turn, formed the basis of Martin Grützmacher’s electric method of sound analysis of 1927, which used an “interference buzzer” (Überlagerungssummer) (Figure 6.11b, circuit diagram, from “Eine neue Methode der Klanganalyse,” Elektrische Nachrichtentechnik 4, no. 12 [1927], 534).

tones but one difference tone, p-q. The presence of such difference tones supplied information about the nonlinearity of a given microphone, a crucial issue in the refinement of radio microphony. In this case as in others, Carl Stumpf ’s experiments with the interference apparatus, paired with his psychological interest in the effects of fil-

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tering on the intelligibility of speech sounds, formed the basis for new research in audio communication. In Meyer’s experiments, however, the microphone took the place of the human listener. The testing of the human perception of speech sounds was replaced by the testing of the responsiveness of microphones to search frequencies with rapidly alternating current. Although Schünemann was not directly involved in the experiments, his correspondence with the manufacturer Eugen Reisz reveals his commitment to facilitating Meyer’s research. Reisz’s company and Siemens & Halske had supplied carbon microphones for the tests without charge, but Meyer’s results turned out to be rather unflattering for Reisz, who thereupon called for a halt to the work.117 Schünemann’s response was stinging: “We neither can, nor wish to, spread any kind of propaganda for this or that product, since we are a scientific artistic institute [wissenschaftlich künstlerisches Institut] and must serve solely the question at hand.”118 Schünemann and his engineering colleagues were well aware that dialogue with radio practitioners was required if their work was to be truly applicable. Radio musicians, radio actors, and news announcers needed to learn how to use the microphones and other technologies they had tested and found to be most appropriate for broadcasting. In 1929, Meyer therefore started to offer electroacoustics courses for radio practitioners at the HHI and Berlin radio lab as a practical introduction to the potentials and weaknesses of contemporary broadcasting technology. But when reflecting on these courses, he argued that technological know-how alone was not enough to compensate for the inferior acoustic quality of recording and playback devices. Well-founded training in music-making and speaking was equally important.119 Once again, that training started with exercises in listening and the gradual change of the learner’s ideas about radio speech.

The Art of Speaking on Air In order to establish a specific speech culture for radio, then, research into both broadcasting technology and the “laws of speaking for radio” were indispensable.120 The latter was the domain of Sprechkunde (speech studies). “Applied speech researchers,” or “speech educators,” usually had a background in both acting and humanities disciplines such as phonetics or literary studies.121 In the 1920s, they were increasingly being employed to improve students’ public speaking skills in universities, holding not professorships but precarious teaching posts. Given this ambivalent position, Schünemann saw a chance to strengthen the hand of the speech educators’ profession and win their support for new forms of research and teaching

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on radio speech. Among the courses taught at the radio lab in October 1929, six were dedicated to radio speech. Although the courses were open to the general public as well as university students, Schünemann stressed their scientific orientation; their teachers were required to analyze the composition and structure of radio speech as the very first step in creating a new art of speaking on the radio.122 This objective was especially dear to speech educator Vilma Mönckeberg-Kollmar. In her course “The Art of Speaking at the Microphone,” Mönckeberg-Kollmar stressed that radio’s “disembodied voice” must imitate neither theatrical declamation nor general public speaking. Mönckeberg-Kollmar proposed to focus on “the pure execution of the work, what the speaker makes of the language, how he forms language: the rhythm, the structure, the melody, the construction of the whole. It becomes apparent whether he is working creatively ‘in language’ just as the sculptor does in clay, the painter in color.”123 Although the radio lab promoted itself as an application-oriented initiative, MönckebergKollmar hesitated to offer all-too-easily applicable instructions for speaking on air, advocating instead for a completely new agenda of individualized research on radio speech. This goal sat somewhat uneasily with the programmatic handbook Rundfunkaussprache (Radio pronunciation) published around the same time by the linguist Theodor Siebs, who regarded radio as the ideal channel for his zeal to standardize the German language. By contrast, the radio lab’s speech research and training aspired not to establish standards, but to sculpt speaker personalities. Like Mönckeberg-Kollmar, the experienced broadcaster Alfred Braun, the most famous announcer of the Berliner Funk- Stunde company and later the head of its drama department, rejected the aim of establishing a unified art of speaking. Braun’s course covered radio genres; the rhythm, dynamics, and tempo of speech; “the treatment of vowels and consonants”; and more generally the “creative design of speech at the microphone” (figure 6.12). Above all, Braun’s practical seminar was intended to sharpen the ear: “We tried to learn more by listening to a voice, so as to understand through listening that the voice, the language, the word, spoken delivery hold greater potential than has ever been realized by those who see, by those who do not depend on listening alone.”124 Only through such attentive listening, argued Braun, was it possible to get a better sense of speaking for radio and perfect one’s own vocal performance. Like speech educators of the time, the radio lab’s teachers also used new technologies to optimize listening and speaking techniques, posture, and distance from the microphone. One of these technologies, the steel

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Figure 6.12: Alfred Braun (left) carrying out microphone tests at the radio laboratory as part of both the lab’s radio training program for radio speakers and the testing of microphones (ca. 1930). Universität der Künste Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, Bestand 1, Nr. F 42.

wire magnetic recorder designed by German physicist and chemist Curt Stille, was a precursor to magnetic tape as patented by Ludwig Blattner soon after.125 Not unlike Gutzmann’s patients with their regular neurological gymnastics sessions at the gramophone, students at the radio lab repeatedly recorded their voices with the Stille device and used the recordings to improve their radio delivery. Again similarly to Gutzmann, the team around Schünemann engaged

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actively in constructing their own technologies for speech education. In 1929, the advent of X-ray cinematography—a procedure by which X-rays were converted into visible light through a fluorescent screen, then filmed—added a further visual dimension to the education of the ear. To apply the new procedure in teaching speech, close collaboration ensued between Schünemann, Berlin radiologist Victor Gottheiner, and technician Heinz Grosse, who soon patented a sound-on-disk process to add synchronized sound to moving X-ray images.126 Every detail of the radio trainees’ speech could be illuminated, from the shape of the mouth to the changing position of the surface and base of the tongue, the palate, the larynx, and the epiglottis. The researchers must have feared the health risks involved, as subjects had to sign a declaration absolving the radio lab from liability for any complications. The films have not survived. What does remain is the paper trail of a battle over intellectual property between Schünemann and Robert Janker, head of surgical radiology at Bonn’s university hospital, over the technique of optical sound in X-ray cinematography.127 Janker and his collaborator, the chemicals conglomerate IG Farben, succeeded in claiming credit. With an implicit nod to the radio lab’s work, in 1937 Janker produced the educational film “X-ray Sound Film of Speech” (figure 6.13), parts of which were screened at the International Film Festival in Venice the same year.128 By that time, the radio lab had already closed—but not before shaping the ears and the tongues of a whole generation of radio announcers, radio actors, and singers.

Future Voices Some have credited the Berlin radio lab with becoming, in the brief span of its existence, a “nascent college of media.”129 Certainly, the lab was a magnet for playwrights, actors, musicians, composers, and journalists. Many hoped to train for a new career in radio in view of the Weimar era’s growing unemployment. However, Schünemann and his colleagues regarded the radio lab only partially as an educational institution. They believed that radio itself was still in the process of “becoming a medium.”130 One of the radio lab’s larger goals was to accompany this process and, as we have seen, to invent future radio voices and radio music—a fundamental reform of the Weimar Republic’s sound culture. Schünemann placed his project in the still-young tradition of laboratory research in the humanities as promoted by Carl Stumpf ’s Institute of Psychology. In contrast to that institution, though, the radio lab defined itself as a project of applied research, on a pattern then found mainly in

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Figure 6.13: Still from the teaching film Röntgentonfilm der Sprache (Germany: Röntgen- und Lichtinstitut Bonn, 1937), dir. Robert Janker. The film is available via the database “Sound & Science: Digital Histories,” https://soundandscience.de/node/ 2489. Digital copy from the media library of the Institut für Medienwissenschaft, Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

engineering. Despite the lab’s cooperation with industry and political bodies, Schünemann insisted on its scientific freedom, hoping less for an immediate use of his colleagues’ work than for a delayed and carefully thought-through application. The lab’s engineers evaluated and improved broadcasting technology of the time, while its speech educators felt free to sculpt speaker personalities rather than formulate sets of instructions for speaking for the radio. The radio lab’s political freedom was more limited. Although Kestenberg and Schünemann saw the lab’s research primarily as an aesthetic and democratic endeavor to establish a new radio art for everyone, it is evident in retrospect that the radio lab also produced technologies and radio voices conducive to the broadcasting goals of the Nazi regime. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Schünemann was critical of the new political environment, but remained outwardly conformist for the most part. In 1935, the lab nevertheless was closed on the grounds that radio-specific art was no longer viable.131 When the lab closed, some of Schünemann’s colleagues pursued successful careers. As a voice-over artist during the war, Alfred Braun found

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himself compelled to lend his voice to Nazi propaganda pieces such as Himmelstürmer of 1941. Friedrich Trautwein, a card-carrying Nazi, was awarded a professorship at the Academy of Music and directed the “music and technology” group there. And when linguist Friedrichkarl Roedemeyer, known to Schünemann through their shared work at Doegen’s sound department, was asked to open Germany’s first department of radio studies at the University of Freiburg in 1939, its main task was to monitor enemy broadcasters. Roedemeyer also followed the radio lab’s example by setting up laboratories for acoustic experiments and elocution training, as well as systematically archiving the voices of Nazi radio.132 Whereas applied research is generally thought of as conservatively serving existing political agendas, then, social democrat Schünemann’s radio lab—if inadvertently—also helped to shape the voices of the radically nationalist system to come.

Immediate and Delayed Applications In the period between 1880 and 1930, numerous German and non-German citizens acquired a new tongue. People suffering from speech disorders found themselves practicing neurological gymnastics daily; they worked on adapting their vocal utterances to what speech therapists adjudged a respectable “human voice.” Prisoners interned in German camps during the First World War learned to fulfill the vocal requirements of researchers associated with the Phonographic Commission, thereby contributing to the construction of discrete foreign tongues. Telephone users, aware of the reduced sound quality of their conversations, acquired effective “telephone speech.” Schoolchildren, civil servants, and the employees of public institutions exchanged their regional dialects for a new standard German. And actors, news announcers, and singers were trained to adjust their voices to the technological conditions of radio broadcasting of their day. These new ways of speaking were all knowledge techniques, informed by the numerous projects in speech therapy and education flourishing at the time. As this chapter has shown, the initiatives in the sciences and humanities that accompanied or advanced these projects were inspired by neurophysiological research on the plasticity of the human brain, and thus the possibility of changing “language pathways” and modes of speaking through constant but ideally unconscious neurological training. Taking up those findings, German research on speech sounds at the turn of the twentieth century framed its task in an increasingly politicized way: a tool of language policy and language planning. Human hearing and speech were found to be malleable, and speech became an index of health policy,

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a sign of national affiliation, and a ticket of admission to the new media of communication. Driven by this political program, most of the scientists and scholars I have presented left their previous fields of pure research in medicine, psychology, phonetics, linguistics, and musicology to develop applicationoriented programs for speech therapy and education. They hoped their work would, as Hermann Gutzmann put it, “not only serve remediation and knowledge, but also enable fruits to ripen that will benefit humanity in its constant life-struggle.”133 Gutzmann clearly regarded himself as a man of science; his colleagues Wilhelm Doegen, Theodor Siebs, and Georg Schünemann came from the humanities. Nevertheless, they all shared a will to render their research applicable on a larger scale, and all had strong social, aesthetic, and technological agendas, which they pursued under the banner of applied research. One exception is the work of philosopher Carl Stumpf, who declined to conduct applied research but played a crucial role in shaping the field of laboratory humanities in the 1910s and 1920s and laid the foundation for Doegen’s and Schünemann’s work. It was Stumpf who brought together research on speech production and speech comprehension, drawing attention to the fact that the human ear is easy to trick— open to new sounds of speech, new voices, and new sonic imaginations. These researchers acquired and disseminated their new knowledge through ever-new media and practices of media use. Whether by means of tuning forks, phonography, phono-photography, radio, steel-wire magnetic recording, or X-ray cinematography, the objects of the speech education I have presented in this chapter learned to speak differently without even knowing it, by practice alone. Some of the scholars, scientists, and artists who used and created these media of speech training were themselves only partly aware of the long-term political dimensions and consequences of their linguistic interventions, though this certainly does not exonerate their contributions to shaping the voices of Nazi Germany. To be sure, Germany’s efforts to achieve a unified, national tongue found counterparts in other European countries of the period. In the United States, by contrast, phoneticians, speech educators, and mass media representatives did not so much support language standards as celebrate the heterogeneity of English dialects and accents. Yet blackfacing “racial masquerades” in early sound film and radio reveal the constructedness of supposedly “‘black’ speech patterns” and indicate white attempts to create a “black dialect” to balance out the many dialects and accents of white immigrants.134 In Germany, research strategies for optimizing speech also provoked harsh criticism from the arts. Avant-garde counterstrategies emerged with

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the aim of emancipating the overly obedient voice, the most prominent being Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s critique of the general insufficiency of language for expressing human thought and the Dadaist sound poems of Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters, which parodied attempts to rigidly standardize the German language and modes of speaking.135 Although such counter-voices were received and heard, they seem to have been unable to make headway against the speech education programs legitimized during the German Empire, the First World War, and the Weimar Republic by the shared power of scientific, scholarly, educational, artistic, and political institutions. In terms of historiography, this power struggle over the sound of language is not easy to unpick. It cannot be reduced to a single speech act and it is not archived in simple data and documents. Instead, its traces are found between the lines of history—sounding out from published and unpublished writings, recordings and photographs stored deep in the archives, and the design of media technologies. What my search in the dusty archives of early-twentieth-century German language planning illustrates is that all of these resources helped to discipline their era’s techniques of thinking and acting with sound.

•

7

•

Conclusion Time Lea ps

In December 1907, Ludwig Darmstaedter, a chemist, businessman, and passionate historian of science, gave the Prussian State Library around 23,000 autographs, a precious collection of handwriting by scientists and scholars from the fifteenth to early twentieth century. The collection featured documents written by many of the figures I have presented in this book, including Jean-Martin Charcot, Ernst Mach, Sigmund Exner, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Hermann Gutzmann.1 In the years that followed, Darmstaedter approached Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, Carl Stumpf, and numerous others with requests to contribute to his treasury.2 When I was working on Thinking with Sound, this German collector became a constant companion—his requests in epistolary form are among the holdings of almost every archive I visited. To be sure, Darmstaedter addressed a far broader range of scholars and scientists than I do here. Strikingly, however, he too sensed that the academic world around him was “thinking with sound,” or at least that it was open to rethinking its research agendas both about and by means of sound. One particular element of Darmstaedter’s project confirms this impression. In 1917, he met with the phonetician Wilhelm Doegen and asked him to produce “voice portraits” of public figures for the autograph collection.3 Doegen immediately obliged, inviting leading representatives of the contemporary humanities and sciences to visit the Prussian State Library, record their voices, and leave their signatures on the disks. Three years later, Doegen became director of the Prussian State Library’s new sound department, where he continued to collaborate with Darmstaedter. Together, they produced around 130 gramophone autographs, a few of which are still preserved today.4 The voice portraits are strikingly brief and concise. In two minutes, speakers give a carefully thought-through reflection on their best-known or most current research. In this sense, the early-twentieth-century speeches

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resemble what is today called an “elevator pitch,” in which academics promote their work in brief conference breaks, in hallway conversations, or at parties. The autograph records produced by Doegen and Darmstaedter at the Prussian State Library during the Weimar Republic forced scholars and scientists to think about their work in a new sonic format. Some of those approached for the sound autograph project have featured prominently in Thinking with Sound. One record showcases Leipzig phonetician Eduard Sievers demonstrating his new “sound analysis” method of recreating the author’s voice from a historical text.5 On another recording, Greifswald linguist Theodor Siebs expounds “The Significance of German Stage Pronunciation for Language Standardization.”6 Whereas Sievers and Siebs had worked with audio technologies before they accepted Doegen’s invitation, other participants were probably speaking into the gramophone horn for the very first time. Zoologist and marine biologist Ernst Haeckel, for instance, gives a short lecture on his Crystal Souls: Studies of Inorganic Life,7 physicist Albert Einstein reports on his latest findings,8 art historian Wilhelm von Bode shares his thoughts about art collections,9 legal scholar Otto von Gierke reflects on the nature of human alliances,10 and, in one of the last recordings of the autograph collection, physicist Max Planck discreetly criticizes the Nazi usurpation of scientific research and appeals for scientific freedom to be preserved.11 The two compilers of this extensive collection justified their initiative by citing the need to create a snapshot of the rapid progression of modernity and its proliferating scientific and humanities disciplines as long as these still existed in such multiplicity and with such distinguished experts.12 That very wealth of new disciplines in the sciences and humanities was, as I have argued in this book, key to the development of a rich diversity of sonic epistemologies in the period around 1900. The 1866 discovery of the human auditory cortex by neuroanatomist Theodor Meynert might be forgotten today if it had not, in the subsequent decades, inspired scholars and scientists from such diverse disciplines, all of them interested in forms and modes of thinking with sound. Neuroanatomical insights into the processing of language in the human brain were taken up widely in the quest to treat patients suffering from aphasia and various kinds of neurosis (chapter 2) and in theories about linguistic structure, speech therapy, and language education (chapters 3 and 6). Deeper analysis of the modes of auditory sensation led to important methods for measuring temporal and spatial phenomena in the physical sciences (chapter 4), while philosophers debated whether auditory memory, and especially musical memory, is limited to a physical notion of time perception (chapter 3). And responding to new empirical research on auditory and motor inter-

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action, a group of psychologists, musicologists, literary scholars, and theater scholars developed their own views on aesthetic perception—views that both supplemented and surpassed its measurability (chapter 5). “Thinking with sound” was far from being a lonely task in the decades around 1900. As this book has shown, auditory concepts did not just set up distinctions between research programs; they also acted as boundary themes for interdisciplinary networks. The members of those networks made use of the full affordances of contemporary musical instruments and sound technologies. The phonograph in particular was deployed in numerous disciplines at the turn of the twentieth century, though I argue that this was due not so much to the “historical a priori of sound recording”—the unexpected invention of a technology that went on to exert great influence on scientific and scholarly thinking.13 The reason, rather, was the co-evolution of sound technologies such as the phonograph and new academic disciplines concerned with sonic phenomena. Thus, Meynert inquired into the auditory memory a decade before Edison’s “talking machine” first made it possible to store auditory signals in a technological medium. Hardly had Edison’s invention become established when Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Henri Bergson began to insist that sound recording technologies would never be able to compete with the “auditory images” produced by the human mind. Sigmund Exner, Ferdinand Brunot, Carl Stumpf, Wilhelm Doegen, and Hermann Gutzmann, in contrast, profited enormously from phonography and refined it to fulfill the needs of research in linguistics, phonetics, speech therapy, tone psychology, and comparative musicology. Scholars and scientists of the time thus exploited a wide range of existing sound technologies, tailoring them to the needs of their research. Jean-Martin Charcot’s 1880s studies on the role of auditory memory in hysteria, for instance, were influenced by Parisian manufacturers’ marketing of giant tuning forks (Charcot himself worked on the construction of exceptionally large and rich-sounding versions). At around the same time, Ernst Mach built on existing methods of schlieren observation to develop a new technology of sound photography that would allow him to study the velocity of sound. Mach considered sound photography a useful support for human sensory perception, while his colleague Sigmund Exner argued that precision instruments should not support but replace human auditory perception and its subjectivity and unreliability. Guided by this premise, Exner designed the acoustometer, an instrument for the apparently objective measurement of reverberation in room acoustics. Likewise, Georg Schünemann and his colleagues at the Berlin radio laboratory did not simply accept broadcasting technology available at the time, but designed

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new microphones, loudspeaker systems, and electronic musical instruments to advance their ambitions for a new radio music and radio speech. Many more examples of the co-construction of users and technologies have featured in this book. They show that powerful liaisons of disciplinary interests, technologies, and scholarly skills did not play out behind the public’s back. Instead, they facilitated new forms of applied research that impacted cultural and political settings concretely, making individuals and whole populations think differently with sound. These applicationoriented agendas in the disciplines I have discussed were driven by new neurophysiological knowledge about the plasticity and malleability of the human brain. The consequent practical possibilities for curing, training, and reshaping the ways in which human beings think with sound attracted researchers in both the humanities and the sciences. Many developed theories, technologies, and techniques that are still relevant to the present day, whether Freud’s famous talking cure, Saussure’s concept of auditory communication, Mach’s methods of comparative listening in physics, Exner’s physical and physiological conception of acoustic space, Pintner’s speed-reading techniques, Gutzmann’s methods of speech rehabilitation, or Siebs’s standard pronunciation of German. The plethora of novel techniques of listening, speaking, singing, reading, and memorizing by ear addressed in this book were knowledge techniques informed by scientific and humanities-based epistemes and brought about by media technologies employed both inside and outside academia. In some of the cases I have examined, pure research and the resulting knowledge techniques came to be applied unexpectedly, exploited to serve economic or political goals. Carl Stumpf ’s research on the perception of speech and musical sounds, for instance, supported technologies of signal compression in telephony and new ways of speaking on the phone from the 1920s onward; Stumpf ’s work on the formation of a “musical consciousness” was taken up by American psychologist Carl Seashore in his tests of musical talent with the aim of identifying hereditary properties and delineating cultural, social, and racial differences. Another example is Georg Schünemann’s Berlin radio lab of the 1920s and 1930s, which, though guided by a social democratic ideal of a new, mass art of radio, nevertheless helped to shape ways of speaking that would become a distinctive element of the Nazi soundscape. Knowledge techniques, then, are the products of clearly recognizable research endeavors. They can be contrasted with more general skills, forms of practical knowledge, and cultural techniques that typify a particular time period. My approach—wide-ranging in terms of disciplines, but geographically restricted—offers the potential for further research on thinking with

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sound both in other regions of the world and transnationally. In terms of a history of sound technology, there is a need to trace in detail how the material infrastructures I have addressed profited from local resources and worldwide supply chains.14 This is exemplified by a 1930 paper by the co-director of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, Erich von Hornbostel, in a very long list of the materials required to produce phonographic and photophonographic devices and recordings. Those materials include a variety of waxes and coconut oil, steel wire, telegraph paper, selenium cells, ivory diaphragms, glass diaphragms, durmast oak, ebony wood, rosewood, aluminum, vulcanized rubber, carbon disulfide, chloroform, vitriol of copper, sulfuric acid, zinc, sapphire, graphite, gasoline, xylene, and badger hair.15 Indeed, the new sound media and large communication systems established in the modern period depended on the availability of vast amounts of “raw materials”—a modern term that itself results from processes of colonial appropriation and exploitation—and the discursive, physical, and technological transformation of “natural resources.” Cities such as Paris, Vienna, and Berlin became important bases for instrument builders, manufacturing industries, and scientific laboratories that celebrated the great wealth of instruments and technologies. But where did their materials originate? How did they reach their destinations? And how would scientists and scholars have worked on and with sound in the period around 1900 if their material supplies had been different or less rich? The geographical provenance of rare materials and the politics of their processing is clearly a theme for further historical investigation. But it is also highly relevant to present-day relations of production, whether in musical or scientific instruments or in energy supply for digital research. There are, of course, many more striking commonalities between disciplinary constellations around 1900 and today’s academic landscape, which is also marked by a fascination with sound or even an “acoustic turn” in both sciences and humanities.16 The histoire totale of thinking with sound that I have presented here reveals the enormous influence of late-nineteenth-century neuroscientific research on a range of disciplines in the subsequent decades, the tensions and rapprochements between the natural sciences and humanities, the energetic adaptation of practical knowledge and new sound technologies to the needs of academic fields, and the centrality of applied research in acoustic epistemologies of the time. In a comparable way, today’s growing field of auditory neuroscience seeks deeper insight into human auditory cognition—trying to understand how our brains follow rhythms of music, how they identify a particular voice in a crowd, and what happens to the brain when hearing is lost.17 Software developers respond with new audio capacities

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in the area of artificial intelligence, from music information retrieval to automatic speech recognition and affective listening software.18 Engineers, economists, and environmental scientists experiment with strategies to sonify large data sets, making use of our capacity to comprehend complex structures by listening.19 In parallel, the field of sound studies is taking shape, bringing together mainly humanities and social science disciplines through shared interest in auditory cultures and new modes of “sonic thinking.”20 It is also clear that disciplinary conjunctions around 1900 gave rise to many of the theorems, disciplines, and technologies underlying recent trends in science and scholarship. Authors such as Charcot, Freud, Mach, Saussure, and Bergson are still read (or being read afresh), and some of the disciplinary agendas I have discussed paved the way for important research fields in the present day, such as speech recognition with its many fields of application. Recent scholarship shows, for example, that Saussure’s view of language as a virtual web of auditory images can only be verified and set in action by large data sets and digital techniques.21 On the other hand, current research sometimes seems to lack the self-confidence of humanities scholars such as Freud, Saussure, and Bergson, who were critical of the neuroscientific discoveries and technologies of their day and came up with alternative, more complex concepts of auditory cognition. That process of discovery required new methods. Louis Havet, Michel Bréal, and l’abbé Pierre-Jean Rousselot were among the scholars who contributed to the “laboratory humanities,” a new field of research that profited from the tradition of the laboratory sciences but also developed its own research questions, methods, and technologies to get closer to the ever-moving target of sonic thought. Humanities scholars in today’s field of auditory cognition are more likely to “service” interdisciplinary and applied research projects and assist the laboratory sciences; we are seeing a new trend in the humanities to ethnographically describe and document research activities in the sciences and technological engineering. Both these approaches have led to important insights. Yet there is also a need for more critical views on today’s acoustic turn, a turn that affects our daily life more deeply than we may notice. We can learn from the period around 1900 that critique in the humanities consists in building counter-theories, tinkering with the technology at hand, and embedding our views in a disciplinarily embracive world of knowledge.

Acknowledgments

The long process of writing this book would have been impossible without generous institutional support from many sources, for which I am immensely grateful. The book was first conceived in 2011, when I was a Feodor Lynen Fellow at the Laboratoires ARIAS and REHSEIS (CNRS) in Paris and then an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam. It took on new forms when I received a Dilthey Fellowship from the Volkswagen Foundation to be pursued in Berlin at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. With the book project in my luggage, I went on to lead the Max Planck Research Group “Epistemes of Modern Acoustics” and the German Research Foundation-funded project “Epistemic Dissonances: Objects and Tools of Early Modern Acoustics” from 2015 to 2020, before taking up a position at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Of inestimable value throughout the book’s evolution were the resourceful librarians at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, who supplied me with many difficult-to-access publications. I also wish to thank the archivists who helped me find precious sources at the Bibliothèque de Genève; the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Yale University Library, New Haven; the Deutsches Museum Archiv in Munich; the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Archiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Archiv der Universität der Künste, and Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin; and the Universitätsarchiv Leipzig. No book has just one author, and I am particularly grateful to the brilliant colleagues with whom I was honored to discuss Thinking with Sound as it developed. They include, among many others, Karin Bijsterveld, Alexander Blum, Joeri Bruyninckx, Lino Camprubí, Lorraine Daston, Veit Erlmann, Fanny Gribenski, Lily Huang, Anna Kvíčalová, Elaine Leong, Myles Jackson, Xiaochang Li, Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, Benjamin

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Steege, Jonathan Sterne, Anke te Heesen, Birgitta von Mallinckrodt, Emily Thompson, Roland Wittje, Rebecca Wolf, and Christine von Oertzen. As the manuscript grew, I had the great pleasure of being involved in several collective publications, all of which inspired my own writing. I thank the coeditors of these projects for the wonderful collaboration: “Listening to the Archive: Sound Data in the Humanities and Sciences” (Technology and Culture 60, no. 2, 2019, coedited with Carolyn Birdsall), Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, coedited with Mara Mills and Alexandra Hui), “Sonic Things: Knowledge Formation in Flux” (Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6, no. 2, 2020, coedited with Leendert van der Miesen), and “Sounds of Language—Languages of Sound” (History of Humanities 6, no. 1, 2021, coedited with Julia Kursell and Hansjakob Ziemer). I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Kate Sturge, who translated some of this book’s chapters from German into English and patiently polished my English writing. She was also the book’s steady and skillfully critical reader. Hannah Eßler was the most thoughtful student assistant I can imagine and a great contributor to this book’s accuracy. Wolfgang Hagen read the manuscript a few months before his death and I will always miss his conversation. For their generous and astute reading of the full manuscript, I also thank Lotte Schüßler, Hannah Wiemer, Sabine Mittermeier, and the anonymous reviewers. Marta Tonegutti has been a supportive, wise, and stringent editor, and I am also indebted to her excellent editorial team at the University of Chicago Press, Dylan Montanari and Kristin Rawlings, and to Jennifer Crane for her careful copyediting. Finally, Marcus Gammel has truly inspired this book and accompanied it from its initial phase to its publication. I am, and will always be, grateful for his intellectual and emotional companionship. This book is dedicated to him and our two children, whose laughter is among the most beautiful sounds I can think of.

Notes

Chapter 1 1. Ballet, Langage intérieur, 26, here cited from the 2nd ed. of 1888. 2. Charle, Théâtres en capitales, 309–54. 3. See the map in Charle, Théâtres en capitales, 33. 4. This was Ballet’s address at least from 1902. See “Liste des membres,” 14. 5. Penesco, Mounet-Sully, 30. 6. Marcus, Drama of Celebrity, 59. 7. In 1954, philosopher Hans Jonas spoke of a “nobility of sight” that characterizes the long history of Western philosophy. In the 1990s, art historians W. J. T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm proclaimed a more general “iconic turn” or “pictorial turn” that prompted many scholars in the humanities to pay attention to past and present strategies of visual knowledge production. For a critical reevaluation, see Alloa, “Iconic Turn”; Levin, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. 8. The book profits from recent work on metropolitan science networks and interurban knowledge transfer including Wise, Aesthetics, Industry & Science; Belhoste, Paris Savant; Gordin, Einstein in Bohemia; Ash, Science in the Metropolis. 9. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 132; see also Latour, “Networks, Societies, Spheres.” 10. Schaffer, “How Disciplines Look.” 11. Meynert, “Ein Fall von Sprachstörung,” 182. Here and throughout, all translations of sources are my own unless otherwise attributed. 12. Meynert, “Ein Fall von Sprachstörung,” 167. 13. Schnupp, Nelken, and King, Auditory Neuroscience. 14. The study does, though, enrich recent literature on nineteenth-century brain research through its special focus on the neural processing of acoustic signals, a topic addressed only peripherally in Tesak and Code, Milestones in the History of Aphasia; Finger, Origins of Neuroscience, 108–33; en passant in McCarthy-Jones, Hearing Voices; Hagner, Homo Cerebralis; Guenther, Localization and Its Discontents; Stahnisch, A New Field in Mind. 15. Notably in Rehding, Hugo Riemann; Erlmann, Reason and Resonance; Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener; Hui, Psychophysical Ear; Brain, Pulse of Modernism; Kursell, Epistemologie des Hörens; Saussy, Ethnography of Rhythm; Netzwerk Hör-Wissen im Wandel, Wissensgeschichte des Hörens; Thorau and Ziemer, Oxford Handbook of Music Listening; Tkaczyk, Mills, and Hui, Testing Hearing. 16. Raulff, Schmidt-Glintzer, and Seemann, “Einen Anfang machen”; Minard,

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“Une nouvelle histoire intellectuelle?” On the historically variable relevance of intellectual history for the history of science, see Clark, “Intellectual History and the History of Science.” 17. Felsch, Der lange Sommer der Theorie; Raulff and Schlak, “Zum Thema,” 4. 18. Clark, “Dialectical Origins of the Research Seminar,” 119–30. 19. Clark, 131–35. 20. Cowles, “On the Origin of Theories.” 21. Daston, “The Academies and the Unity of Knowledge.” 22. C. P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture on the “two cultures” in British academia provoked a worldwide, ongoing debate on the social and institutional conditions that prefigured scientific and humanities research. Snow, Two Cultures. 23. Porter, “Introduction,” 109. 24. Very little research has been undertaken into these national differences. An exception is Kleinert, “Wechselbeziehungen.” 25. Krämer, “Shifting Demarcations”; see Hamann, “Boundary Work.” 26. Foucault, Order of Things, 375–422. 27. Thus the title of seminal volume edited by Friedrich Kittler, Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften. See Kittler, introduction to Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften, 9. 28. See Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 29. 29. Bohlman and McMurray, “Tape,” 4, 8. 30. Sterne, Audible Past, 2; Gitelman, Always Already New. 31. Radano and Olaniyan, “Introduction: Hearing Empire”; Liebersohn, Music and the New Global Culture. 32. Vogl, “Becoming-media.” 33. Bruyninckx and Supper, “Sonic Skills in Cultural Contexts”; Bijsterveld, Sonic Skills. 34. See Bud, “‘Applied Science.’” 35. For a general overview, see Kaldewey and Schauz, Basic and Applied Research. 36. Thompson, Soundscape of Modernity; Jackson, Harmonious Triads; Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound; Volmar, Klang-Experimente; Wittje, Age of Electroacoustics; Bruyninckx, Listening in the Field. 37. Valleriani, “Epistemology of Practical Knowledge”; Burke, What Is the History of Knowledge?, 28–31; Daston, “History of Science”; Bartsch et al., “Editors’ Introduction.” 38. Steinberg, “Applied Humanities?” 39. In this respect, Thinking with Sound contributes to a new historiography of the humanities as called for by Bod, New History of the Humanities; Bod and Kursell, “Introduction: The Humanities and the Sciences”; Small, Value of the Humanities. 40. Most of the recent literature on cultural techniques comes from the field of German media and cultural theory. See Siegert, “Cultural Techniques.” 41. Oudshoorn and Pinch, “Introduction,” 1.

Chapter 2 1. Today, the couch can be seen in the Freud Museum in Vienna. Engelman, Sigmund Freud, 39. 2. Freud, “Autobiographical Study,” 28.

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3. Alt, Sigmund Freud, 108–12. 4. The “Second Vienna Medical School” emerged in the mid-nineteenth century around the physicians Carl von Rokitansky and Joseph Škoda. Lesky, Die Wiener Medizinische Schule, 119–292. 5. Guenther, Localization and Its Discontents, 15. 6. This approach gave prominence to diagnostic methods such as those of percussion and auscultation, developed by Škoda: using a stethoscope, physicians attempted to pick out from the sounds of breathing and coughing the signs of pathologies that could then be localized anatomically. Škoda, Abhandlung über Perkussion und Auskultation. For Škoda’s variations on the techniques of auscultation developed by René T. Laennec, see Lachmund, “Making Sense of Sound.” 7. Meynert, “Ein Fall von Sprachstörung,” 182. 8. Harrington, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain; Breidbach, Die Materialisierung des Ichs; Hagner, Homo Cerebralis; Guenther, Localization and Its Discontents. 9. Gall, Sur les fonctions du cerveau, 5:12–50, esp. 17. 10. Flourens, Recherches expérimentales. On the debate, see Hagner, Homo Cerebralis, 114–18. 11. See Hagner, Der Geist bei der Arbeit, 51. 12. Broca, “Perte de la parole”; Broca, “Remarques sur le siège de la faculté du langage.” 13. Broca, “Remarques sur le siège de la faculté du langage,” 384. 14. Meynert, “Ein Fall von Sprachstörung,” 167. 15. Meynert, 182. 16. Wernicke, Der aphasische Symptomenkomplex, 18–23; Wernicke, “Aphasia Symptom Complex,” 103–7 (translation emended). 17. Wernicke, Der aphasische Symptomenkomplex, 20; Wernicke, “Aphasia Symptom Complex,” 105. 18. Meynert, “Gehirn und Gesittung” (1888) and “Über das Zusammenwirken der Gehirnteile” (1890), in Meynert, Sammlung von populärwissenschaftlichen Vorträgen, 139–79, 205–6; Meynert, “Der Bau der Gross-Hirnrinde.” 19. Freud, “Autobiographical Study,” 11. 20. On Freud’s views on the much-debated concept of psychophysical parallelism, see Wegener, “Der psychophysische Parallelismus,” 296–97. 21. This view is examined in detail in Guenther, Localization and Its Discontents, 68–95. 22. Freud, “Autobiographical Study,” 36. 23. Sigmund Freud to Minna Bernays, December 3, 1885, in Letters of Sigmund Freud, 187. 24. Freud to Martha Bernays, October 21, 1885, in Letters of Sigmund Freud, 175–76. 25. Charcot cited Broca in his 1883 lectures on aphasia, for example, “Des différentes formes de l’aphasie.” See Gasser, “Charcot et les localisations cérébrales.” 26. Charcot, Clinical Lectures, 3:162–63. 27. On Charcot’s concept of “grand hysteria,” see Mayer, Sites of the Unconscious, 20. 28. Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, 7, 19–21. 29. For Charcot’s use of older psychotherapeutic procedures including mesmerism and hypnotism, see Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 112–20; Mayer, Sites of the Unconscious, 19–37. 30. Foucault, Psychiatric Power; Goldstein, “Uses of Male Hysteria”; Goetz, Bon-

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duelle, and Gelfand, Charcot, 60–62; Danziger, Constructing the Subject; Carroy, Hypnose. 31. See Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria; de Marneffe, “Looking and Listening.” 32. Charcot, “Catalepsie et somnambulisme hystériques provoqués,” 258. 33. Charcot, 262–63. 34. Miller, Anecdotal History of the Science of Sound, 85–92; Mayer, “Researchers in Acoustics”; Pantalony, Altered Sensations. 35. This set was exhibited in 1882 at the Canadian Institute in Toronto. Pantalony, “Rudolph Koenig’s Workshop,” 74. 36. Koenig collaborated closely with several physiologists, experimenting with Charcot’s teacher Claude Bernard on methods of registering sound graphically. Charles Féré, Charcot’s assistant and from 1887 director of the Hôpital Bicêtre’s physiological laboratory, also produced tuning forks with Koenig to measure muscle tension in bone conduction and aural hearing. Féré, Sensation et mouvement, 39; see Brain, Pulse of Modernism, 105–6. 37. Charcot, “Catalepsie et somnambulisme hystériques provoqués,” 262. 38. Vigouroux, “Métalloscopie, Métallothérapie, Aesthésiogènes,” esp. nos. 2–4: 272–73 and no. 5: 107. Paul Richer, another student of Charcot’s, took a different approach again, embedding the experiments with tuning forks in the long tradition of music therapy. Richer, Études cliniques, 599–600. This remains the context in which Charcot’s tuning forks are viewed today. See Kennaway, Bad Vibrations, 80–84; Raz, “Of Sound Minds and Tuning Forks.” 39. In the Weber test and the Rinne test, developed at that time by Ernst Weber and Adolf Rinne, tuning forks placed on the forehead or behind the ear were sounded to distinguish between conductive and sensorineural hearing loss. On the use of tuning forks in nineteenth-century medical diagnosis, see also Blake, “Tuning Forks.” 40. The frequency of concert pitch A4 differed substantially within Europe, and it was not until an 1885 conference on pitch that the Paris concert pitch or diapason normal, A=435 Hz, was at least temporarily adopted almost all over Europe. Jackson, “From Scientific Instruments to Musical Instruments,” 202–5; Gribenski, “Écrire l’histoire du la.” 41. Bourneville and Regnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, 3:178–80. 42. Charcot, “On a Case of Word-Blindness” and “On a Case of Sudden and Isolated Suppression of the Mental Vision of Signs and Objects,” in Clinical Lectures, 3:130–50, 151–63. 43. Hartley, Observations on Man, Part 1, 268; see also Ballet, Langage intérieur, 16. 44. The bell, like the tuning fork, was a decidedly disciplinary instrument. Bells in nineteenth-century France were the ubiquitous governor of the rhythms of life. See Corbin, Village Bells. 45. Medicus, “Das Theater der Nervosität”; Schade and Derieg, “Charcot and the Spectacle of the Hysterical Body.” 46. Freud to Martha Bernays, November 24, 1885, in Letters of Sigmund Freud, 185. 47. Freud, “Charcot,” 17. 48. Draft of a letter from Freud to Charcot, December 9, 1885. Library of Congress, Washington, hereafter “LoC”, mss39990, box 20 (Sigmund Freud Papers: General Correspondence, 1871–1996); Charcot, J. M.; 1885–90.

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49. Freud to Martha Bernays, December 12, 1885, in Letters of Sigmund Freud, 189. 50. See Freud’s letters to Martha Bernays on January 18, January 22, February 2, and February 10, 1886, in Letters of Sigmund Freud, 193, 194–97, 203–4, 206–9. 51. Vayre, “Gilbert Ballet”; Mathieu, “Nécrologie.” 52. Ballet, Langage intérieur, 151–54, image on 152. 53. Ballet, Langage intérieur, 8n1, 157. In his doctoral dissertation (Ballet, Recherches anatomiques et cliniques), Ballet also suggested that rather than clearly demarcated sensory centers, there is a broader motor-sensory center that can partially compensate for damage. Later, he tried to localize motor capacities and studied lesions of the motor center in aphasics. Ballet, “Nouveau fait relatif aux locations cérébrales”; Ballet, “Contribution à l’étude des localisations”; Ballet, “Un cas d’aphasie motrice”; Ballet and Boix, “Aphasie motrice”; Ballet, “Un cas de surdité verbale.” 54. Bourneville and Régnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, 3:176, Plates 22, 23, 37. 55. Ballet, “Nouveau fait à l’appui de la localisation.” 56. Kussmaul, “Disturbances of Speech,” 747–78, 783–98, 811–44, quotation 613–14. 57. Kussmaul, 583, 624, 690–717, 744–46. 58. Kussmaul, 613–14. 59. Kussmaul, 650–51. 60. Kussmaul, 589–90. 61. Kussmaul, 618. 62. Kussmaul, 614. 63. Kussmaul, 778–81. 64. Ballet, Langage intérieur, 65–66, 164–70. 65. Ballet, ix. 66. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, 7. See also Solhdju, Selbstexperimente, 13–15. 67. Charcot, Leçons du mardi à la Salpêtrière, 1887–1888, 118. This distrust of the study did not prevent Charcot from accumulating an impressive private library of around thirty-five hundred items, which is now housed at the Salpêtrière. 68. Ballet, Langage intérieur, 20. 69. To some extent, Ballet could base himself on the work of the Nancy psychiatrist Hippolyte Bernheim, who contested Charcot’s use of hypnosis as a method of neural alteration in the diseased. Suggestion affects the healthy just as much as the sick, Bernheim argued, and it can also be employed for autosuggestive therapies that rely on the observation and change of one’s own thoughts. Bernheim, Suggestive Therapeutics, 15, ch. 2. On the “School of Nancy,” see Mayer, Sites of the Unconscious, 49–60; Klein, “Nouveau regard sur l’École hypnologique.” 70. Ballet, Langage intérieur, 29. 71. Ballet, 20. 72. Ballet, 26. 73. Ballet, 25. 74. Ballet, 27 (original emphasis). 75. Ballet, 10–11. 76. Egger, La parole intérieure. 77. Ballet, Langage intérieur, 18. 78. Ballet, 18. 79. Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, 142, 145. 80. Ballet, Langage intérieur, 19.

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81. Meier-Oeser, Die Spur des Zeichens; Meier-Oeser, “Wort, inneres; Rede, innere,” 1037; Puech, “Langage intérieur et ontologie linguistique”; Gauker, Words and Images; McCarthy-Jones, Hearing Voices; Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh; Panaccio, Le discours intérieur. 82. Augustine, On the Trinity, Book XV, ch. 11.20, 399; Book XV, ch. 10.18, 398. 83. Augustine, Book XV, ch. 11.20, 400. 84. Condillac, Logic, 77–78. 85. Bonnet, Essai de psychologie, 45–46. 86. Rivarol, De l’universalité de la langue française, 18, quoted in Ballet, Langage intérieur, 17. 87. Rivarol, De l’universalité de la langue française, 19. 88. Bonald, Législation primitive, 1:40, quoted in Ballet, Langage intérieur, 18. 89. Bonald, Législation primitive, 1:41. 90. Ballet, Langage intérieur, 4. 91. Ballet, 6. 92. Ballet, 17. 93. Vayre, “Gilbert Ballet,” 263–64; Tiberghien, “Chair of Mental and Brain Diseases,” 41. 94. Ballet, Leçon d’inauguration. 95. “Composition du bureau,” 22; “Séance du 10 février 1909,” 56–57. 96. Postel and Allen, “L’œuvre historique de Gilbert Ballet.” 97. Laignel-Lavastine, “L’œuvre psychiatrique et sociale de Gilbert Ballet,” 553. 98. Ballet, Swedenborg, vii. 99. Ballet, Swedenborg, 106–30, quotation 128. 100. Laignel-Lavastine, “L’œuvre psychiatrique et sociale de Gilbert Ballet,” 553. 101. Charcot, Neue Vorlesungen. 102. Freud, “Report on My Studies in Paris and Berlin,” 6, 10. 103. Gay, Freud, 53–54. 104. Freud, “Autobiographical Study,” 15–16. 105. Freud, 17. 106. Charcot to Freud, January 23, 1888. LoC, mss39990, box 20, Charcot, J. M.; 1885–90. 107. Freud, On Aphasia, 57, 102. 108. Freud, 55. 109. Freud, 62–63. 110. Freud, 78, 87. 111. Freud, 62. 112. Freud, 90, 99. 113. Freud, 83. 114. Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 295. 115. Freud, 298–315. 116. Freud, 300. 117. Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 199. 118. Derrida, 207, 209, 218. 119. Derrida, 206. 120. Derrida, 209, 218. 121. Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 365. 122. Freud, 374.

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123. Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” 20–21. 124. Freud, 23. 125. Freud, 25. 126. Freud, 21. 127. Freud, 19–21. 128. Freud, 36–37. 129. See Wirth, “‘Piep’: Die Frage nach dem Anrufbeantworter,” 174. 130. Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” 52–53 (original emphasis). 131. Elsewhere, Freud made a similar point with the notion of a “vacillating rhythm” that regulates the energies of the unconscious through resistance, impulses, and compulsive repetition. Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 41. See Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 273–74, 288. 132. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 1:183–205. On Husserl’s notion of internal perception, see Logical Investigations 2:336–48. 133. Husserl, 1:191. 134. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena. For a critical reading of Derrida’s Husserl interpretation, see Evans, Strategies of Deconstruction. 135. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, 2:374–77. 136. Breuer, “Theoretical Material,” in Breuer and Freud, Studies in Hysteria, 151, 154. 137. Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 348. 138. Freud, “Charcot,” 21, 23. 139. Charcot, Poliklinische Vorträge, vol. 1. 140. Charcot to Freud, June 30, 1892. LoC, mss39990, box 20, Charcot, J. M.; 1885– 90. See also Gelfand, “Mon cher docteur Freud,” 581. 141. Lecourt, Freud et l’univers sonore; Meyer-Kalkus, Stimme und Sprechkünste, 382–426. 142. Breuer, “The Case of Anna O.,” in Breuer and Freud, Studies in Hysteria, 27. 143. Knowles, Wicked Waltz, 51–54. 144. Hanslick, “Wortlose Friedens-Marseillaise.” See Iitti, The Feminine, 100. 145. Breuer, “The Case of Anna O.,” in Breuer and Freud, Studies in Hysteria, 30. 146. Freud, “Autobiographical Study,” 26. 147. Freud, “Psychotherapy of Hysteria,” in Breuer and Freud, Studies in Hysteria, 204. 148. Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis,” 30. 149. Freud, 30. 150. Freud, 59–62. 151. Freud, 48. 152. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 4:277, 5:536–47, esp. 541 including Fig. 3. 153. Freud, 4:32, 4:49. 154. Freud, 4:14, 4:195. 155. Crichton, “Freud and Wagner’s Meistersinger.” 156. Freud to Fliess, December 12, 1897, in Freud, Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 286. 157. Hanslick, Music Criticism, 116, 121. Hanslick’s review appeared after the Meistersinger premiere in Munich in 1868, and in a slightly different version after the opera’s first performance in Vienna in 1870. The relationship between Wagner and Hanslick, notoriously difficult and probably marked by antisemitism, is indicated in

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early drafts of the Meistersinger, where the town clerk Sixtus Beckmesser was allusively named Veit Hanslich. See Stollberg, Auge und Ohr, 205. 158. Wagner developed this idea of the composer’s imaginary “sound-world” as an analogy to the “vivid world of dreams” in his 1870 essay on Beethoven. On Wagner’s positive reinterpretation of Schopenhauer’s misanthropic concepts of the human will and dreaming, see Karnes and Mitchell, “Schopenhauer’s Influence on Wagner,” 523– 27; Stollberg, Auge und Ohr, 118–29. 159. Gay, Freud, 168. 160. Grey and Daub, “Wagner after Freud,” 116–17. 161. Wagner, Artwork of the Future, 25. Wagner was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer’s epistemology. Freud cited Wagner but denied Schopenhauer’s influence on his own work, though recent studies reveal striking parallels between the two scholars’ concepts of the unconscious. See Stollberg, Auge und Ohr, 249–52. 162. Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life; Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci.” See Alt and Anz, Sigmund Freud. 163. Freud, “Psycho-Analytic Notes,” 35–36. 164. Freud’s first encounter with talking therapies went back to the psychiatrist Hippolyte Bernheim, who also influenced Ballet and whose work Freud translated into German in 1889. Freud, “Autobiographical Study,” 18; Bernheim, Suggestive Therapeutics. 165. Breuer, “The Case of Anna O.,” in Breuer and Freud, Studies in Hysteria, 20. 166. Breuer and Freud, preface to Breuer and Freud, Studies in Hysteria, v. 167. Breuer and Freud, “The Psychic Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena,” in Breuer and Freud, Studies in Hysteria, 10. 168. Breuer and Freud, 7. 169. Breuer and Freud, 12. 170. Freud, “Note on the Unconscious,” 263. 171. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 25. 172. Freud, 26. 173. Freud, 46. 174. Gay, Freud, 103. 175. Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment,” 126. 176. Freud, “Psychotherapy of Hysteria,” in Breuer and Freud, Studies in Hysteria, 212. 177. Freud, “Autobiographical Study,” 40. 178. Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis,” 12. 179. Freud, “Recommendations to Physicians,” 111–12. 180. Freud, 112. 181. Freud, 115–16. 182. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 88; Enns, “Voices of the Dead.” 183. Wirth, “‘Piep’: Die Frage nach dem Anrufbeantworter,” 174–75. 184. Freud, “Recommendations to Physicians,” 112. 185. Freud, 113. 186. Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis,” 10. 187. See Alt, Sigmund Freud, 60, 67–73. 188. Alt, Sigmund Freud, 66. 189. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 20–21. 190. Green and Troup, “The Empiricists,” 2–3. On the long-term development

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of history’s auxiliary sciences, see Rexroth, “Woher kommen die Historischen Hilfswissenschaften?” 191. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 20. 192. Freud, 17, 18 (emphasis added). 193. Freud, 18–19. 194. The following pages expand on points outlined in Birdsall, Parry, and Tkaczyk, “Listening to the Mind.” 195. Jung, “Psycho-Analysis and Association Experiments,” 298. 196. Jung, 321. 197. Abraham, “Should Patients Write down Their Dreams?” See also Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 92–93. 198. Reik, Listening with the Third Ear, esp. ch. 15. 199. Reik, 146–47. 200. Reik, 147. 201. Reik, 136. 202. Zinn, “A Psychiatric Study of a Schizophrenic,” 1:vi. 203. See Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 115–90. 204. See Kirschenbaum and Jourdan, “Current Status of Carl Rogers.” 205. Rogers, Counseling and Psychotherapy, 122–26. 206. Rogers, “Use of Electrically Recorded Interviews”; Covner, “Studies in Phonographic Recordings.” 207. See Birdsall, Parry, and Tkaczyk, “Listening to the Mind.” 208. Hirsch Weir, Language in the Crib, 7. For more detail on Hirsch Weir’s work, see Tkaczyk, “How to Turn Interior Monologues Inside Out.” 209. Freud, “Charcot,” 12. 210. Freud, On Aphasia, 92, 100. 211. Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” 53. 212. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 18.

Chapter 3 1. Edison, Phonograph or speaking machine. 2. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 80. 3. Guyau, “Origin of the Idea of Time,” 117–20, quotation 117–18, translation slightly emended. Also translated in Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 30–33. 4. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 33. 5. A related point is made by the historian of science Douwe Draaisma, who locates Guyau’s essay in the genealogy of late-nineteenth-century experimental psychologists such as Hermann Ebbinghaus and Ernst Meumann. Discussing auditory learning processes, these scientists compared the human memory’s capacities with the storage function of the phonograph. Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory, 85–92. 6. For a critical view, see Bohlman and McMurray, “Tape.” 7. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 22–23, 275–83; also McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 3–6. 8. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 24. 9. Saussure, 26. 10. Saussure, 29. 11. Saussure, 25.

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12. Saussure, 24. 13. Especially Godel, Les sources manuscrites; Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale. 14. Wunderli, preface to Cours de linguistique générale, 7. 15. Jäger, Ferdinand de Saussure, 14. 16. Jäger, 27–35. 17. Saussure, in Godel, “Souvenirs,” 20. 18. Wunderli, introduction to Cours de linguistique générale, 16–17. 19. Godel, “Souvenirs,” 22. 20. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 94. 21. Osthoff, Das physiologische und psychologische Moment, 3. Nevertheless, Osthoff, too, positioned linguistics between the humanities and the sciences. Osthoff, Das physiologische und psychologische Moment, 46–47. 22. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 94. This question took Saussure further than his Leipzig teacher Karl Brugmann, whose “science of principles” aimed to bring together the methods of philology and comparative linguistics. Brugmann, Zum heutigen Stand der Sprachwissenschaft, 33, 38. 23. The term “phoneme” was first used by the amateur phonetician Antoni Dufriche-Desgenettes in a 1873 paper presented to the Societé de Linguistique in Paris. Saussure used the term in his Mémoire sur le système primitif of 1879 without providing a clear definition. 24. Saussure asserted that the vowel a1 [*/e/] is the most “radical vowel of all roots,” followed by three vowel gradations. Saussure’s Mémoire boldly responded to a politically and theologically motivated discourse on the alleged Ursprache of the IndoEuropean languages, and to a debate on the laws of Indo-European sound change that had been launched by Jacob Grimm in the 1810s, then taken up by Franz Bopp, Georg Curtius, Karl Brugman, and others. The study earned Saussure praise, harsh criticism, and accusations of plagiarism all at once. Saussure, Mémoire sur le système primitif, 135. See Joseph, Saussure, 228–49; Olender, Languages of Paradise, 8, 16, 99–101. 25. Saussure, Mémoire sur le système primitif, 1–5, quotation 5. 26. Whitney’s definition of language and his call for a general science of language is outlined in Whitney, Life and Growth of Language, 1–6. See Joseph, Saussure, 254–56. 27. This is surmised by Jäger, Ferdinand de Saussure, 54. 28. Hagner, Homo cerebralis, 279–93. 29. Hitzig, “Über Localisation,” 46. 30. Steinthal, “Diskussionsbeitrag zur Sitzung vom 14. März 1874,” 50. 31. Steinthal, Einleitung in die Psychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 482. 32. Steinthal, “Diskussionsbeitrag zur Sitzung vom 13. Juni 1874,” 133. Whitney, in turn, formulated his call for a general theory of language in critical dialogue with what he considered to be Steinthal’s overly simple theory of language. Whitney, “Are Languages Institutions?” 33. On Saussure’s position within debates over “linguistic remnants” and “linguistic monuments,” and his theory of the evolution of languages, see Mejía Quijano, Le cours d’une vie, 2:55–76. 34. The Havet and Saussure families were acquainted, and Havet had written a sympathetic review of Ferdinand de Saussure’s first monograph. Havet, “Mémoire”; see Jäger, Ferdinand de Saussure, 58.

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35. Bréal, introduction to Grammaire comparée des langues indo-européennes; see Brain, Pulse of Modernism, 67. 36. Wunderli, introduction to Cours de linguistique générale, 20–21. 37. See Brain, Pulse of Modernism, 64–92; Brain, “Standards and Semiotics.” 38. Marey, La méthode graphique, v. 39. Marey, “Inscription des phénomènes phonétiques.” Scott’s patents can also be accessed at www.firstsounds.org. It proved possible to reconstruct Scott’s recordings from his graphic phonautograms. See Feaster, “Enigmatic Proofs”; Benoit et al., “Chronique d’une invention.” 40. Edison’s presentation sparked an argument over who invented the phonograph first, Edison himself or the Frenchman Charles Cros. See Giuliani, “1887–1889.” 41. Rosapelly, “Inscriptions des mouvements phonétiques,” 112. Rosapelly adopted the term from the physicist Jules Antoine Lissajous. 42. The group’s work on “phonemes” was further popularized through Havet’s foundation of the International Phonetic Association in 1886. See Brain, Pulse of Modernism, 73. 43. Rosapelly, “Inscriptions des mouvements phonétiques,” 113. 44. Rousselot, Les modifications phonétiques, 66; see Brain, Pulse of Modernism, 82; Saussy, Ethnography of Rhythm, 97–107. 45. Rousselot, Les modifications phonétiques, 72–86; see Pernot, “L’Abbé Rousselot.” 46. Brunot, “Discours de M. Ferdinand Brunot,” 13. See Cordereix, “Ferdinand Brunot”; Verdure, “Les archives de l’enregistrement sonore”; Kursell, Tkaczyk, and Ziemer, “Introduction.” 47. Egger, La parole intérieure. On Egger’s significance for Saussure, see especially Joseph, Saussure, 288–91; Joseph, “Saussure’s Notes.” The following comments build upon Joseph’s work; I compared his transcription with Saussure’s handwritten notes in the Archives de Saussure (Bibliothèque de Genève) and in some cases corrected it. 48. Egger, La parole intérieure, 9–64. 49. Egger, 1, 65–124; see Puech, “Langage intérieur,” 30. 50. Egger, La parole intérieure, 5–6, 66–67, 73–74. 51. Egger, 71. 52. Egger, 4, 5–8. 53. See also Puech, “Langage intérieur.” 54. On Ballet’s reading of Egger, see especially Ballet, Langage intérieur, 19–31. 55. Gabriel Bergounioux, too, suspects that Charcot, Ballet, and Egger influenced Saussure. Bergounioux, “Saussure,” 175. 56. Saussure’s plan of studies for 1880–81 is found on the inside cover of the manuscript of his Leipzig dissertation, Houghton Library Harvard, bMS Fr 266 1. See Joseph, “Saussure’s Notes,” 105. 57. “Egger. La Parole intérieure. À en juger par les 1ers pages tt le livre va reposer sur une inexactitude d’observation: sur la distinction insuffisante entre le passage de l’idée au mot et le passage du mot à l’idée.” Registre 1 (Ferdinand de Saussure’s notes, ca. 1877–85), 99, Archives de Saussure, Bibliothèque de Genève (hereafter “AdS”), 374/1. Here and in the following, I cite the new pagination of 2012 rather than the older, non-unified folio pagination. 58. “Oui, paru que ns n’écrivons , qu’après avoir traduit la

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pensée en parole intérieure . Mais ns pensions sans accompagnement néanm de parole intère.” AdS, 374/1, 99. 59. “P. 25: Bonald: l’homme pense sa parole avant de parler sa pensée / je dirais: l’homme pense sa parole avant de la parler.” AdS, 374/1, 99. See Bonald, Législation primitive, 1:40. Ballet, too, referenced Bonald. Ballet, Langage intérieur, 18 and 31; see chapter 2. 60. Egger writes: “In order to contemplate this phenomenon in the spirit of psychology, one would first have to distinguish the image from the sound sensation, then to realize that vocal images form regular series within the consciousness.” Egger, La parole intérieure, 16. 61. Egger, La parole intérieure, 114. See Joseph, Saussure, 325. 62. “P. 16 à relire. Le terme d’images vocales. ‘distinguer l’image de la sensation sonore.’” AdS, 374/1, 99. 63. Saussure, Phonétique, 96–97, plate V. 64. Kim, “La raison graphique de Saussure,” 23. 65. See also Bergounioux, “Saussure,” 175–76. 66. Saussure, Phonétique, 137. 67. Saussure, 142. 68. Saussure, 96, 145. 69. Saussure, 91. 70. Saussure, 76, 85–86. 71. Saussure, 91. 72. Saussure, 77. 73. Saussure, 120. 74. Saussure had hoped for the chair of “Sanscrit et grammaire comparée” at the Sorbonne, which was ultimately awarded to Victor Henry. Joseph, Saussure, 349–58. 75. Jäger, Ferdinand de Saussure, 68–70. 76. Saussure also took part in Flournoy’s now famous spiritualist séances with the medium Hélène Smith (actually Catherine-Élise Müller), who claimed to be able to speak “Hindu” and the language of Martians. See Joseph, Saussure, 392–97, 426–36; Rosenberg, “Speaking Martian.” 77. Flournoy, Des phénomènes de synopsie, 7. 78. Flournoy, 20–37. 79. Flournoy, 37–38. 80. The questionnaire, created by Flournoy’s assistant Édouard Claparède, is reproduced in Flournoy, Des phénomènes de synopsie, 256. 81. Flournoy, Des phénomènes de synopsie, 50. 82. Cifali, “Théodore Flournoy”; Cifali, “Présentation de De Saussure F.”; Saussure, “Réponse à une enquête.” 83. Flournoy, Des phénomènes de synopsie, 50. 84. Flournoy, 52–53. Flournoy thus refuted the work of Bleuler and Lehmann in their Zwangsmässige Lichtempfindungen. 85. Saussure in Flournoy, Des phénomènes de synopsie, 50–51. Flournoy interprets Saussure’s negative color ideas on a purely acoustic level, as an excess of different color impressions that cancel each other out (65–66). 86. Derrida, “Différance.” 87. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 77, 25, 34.

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88. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 12, 67. 89. Saussure, 110. 90. Wegener, “Der psychophysische Parallelismus,” 297–300. 91. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 111. 92. Saussure, 93. 93. Saussure, 11. 94. Saussure, 11 (emphasis added). 95. Saussure, 33. 96. Saussure, 11. On the rhetorical significance of Saussure’s sketches, see Kim, “La raison graphique de Saussure,” 33. 97. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 11–14, quotations 13. 98. Saussure, 13. 99. Saussure, 15. 100. Saussure, 13. Harris’s translation of the Cours uses word patterns and sound patterns for Saussure’s images verbales and images acoustiques. 101. Saussure, Writings in General Linguistics, 73. 102. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 3–4. 103. Saussure, 87. 104. Saussure, 76. 105. Saussure, 214–16. 106. Saussure, 79. 107. Saussure, 16. 108. Saussure, 99–100, 51. 109. Saussure, 121–25, 100. 110. Saussure, 4, 5. 111. Saussure, 5. 112. Saussure, 21–23, 15. 113. Saussure, 74–78. 114. Saussure, 81–82. 115. “On n’analyse jamais les membres de phrase, les mots, les suffixes qu’on prononce. On ne fait que leur synthèse . Mais pour trouver un membre de pr., on a analysé, et ds plusieurs phrases, etc. et +sieurs Le linguiste analyse pour pouvoir ensuite abstraire. qui parle analyse pour pouvoir synthétiser, et il synthétise pour pouvoir parler.” AdS, 374/1, 358. 116. Kim, “La raison graphique de Saussure,” 23. Sung-Do Kim’s brilliant essay does not discuss the sketches of human figures and heads in Saussure’s notebooks. 117. “[L]a description nue des sons.” “Qu’y a-t-il à dire en effet sur les phonèmes d’une langue quelconque? Les inventorier en les décrivant exactement”; “états linguistq.” Ferdinand de Saussure, note dated December 1884, in AdS, 374/1, 315–16. 118. For Saussure’s critique of the linguistics of the alphabet, see Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 25. Haun Saussy nevertheless describes Saussure’s phonology as the “return of the alphabet, restored on an ideal basis.” Saussy, Ethnography of Rhythm, 109. Saussy is criticizing Robert Brain’s hypothesis that Saussure drew on l’abbé Rousselot’s phonetics and elaborated it into phonology. Brain, “Standards and Semiotics,” 280–84. In my view, Saussure did follow Rousselot to the extent that he

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called for the privileged status of texts as sources to be abandoned in favor of a psycholinguistic approach. 119. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 39. 120. The anecdote is reported by the journalist and historian of literature René Doumic, among others. Doumic, “Réponse,” 54. 121. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 332. 122. Bergson, Matière et mémoire, 4 (preface to the 7th ed.). 123. On Bergson’s critique of materialist philosophy, see Madelrieux, “Bergson and Naturalism.” 124. On Bergson’s reception of his era’s brain research, see Gallois, “En quoi Bergson,” 11–15. 125. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 106–8 (quotation 107), 160–61, 321–22. 126. Nicolas and Murray, “Théodule Ribot”; Nicolas and Charvillat, “Introducing Psychology as an Academic Discipline.” 127. Ribot, Diseases of Memory, 10, 127. 128. Ribot, 142. Ribot was referring to the Strasbourg psychologist Adolf Kussmaul, whose studies would also be seminal for physiologist Gilbert Ballet, philosopher Ernst Mach, and phoniatrist Hermann Gutzmann. See chapters 2, 4 and 6. 129. Ribot, Les maladies de la mémoire, 11. I cite the French edition here because the 1882 English translation omits this paragraph. 130. Ribot, Diseases of Memory, 66–67. Later, Ribot specifically excluded the debate on brain localization from his study (164). 131. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 38. See also the preface to the 7th French ed., Matière et mémoire, 6. 132. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 20, 83. 133. Among those inspired by Bergson’s notion of the image was Gilles Deleuze. See Deleuze, Cinema 1; Deleuze, Cinema 2. 134. Bergson, Matter and Memory, vii–viii. 135. Bergson, 35. 136. Bergson, 64. 137. Bergson, 39. 138. Bergson, 160. 139. Bergson, 170. 140. Bergson, 156. 141. Bergson, 154. 142. Bergson, 147. 143. Bergson, 147. 144. Bergson, 135–36. 145. Bergson, 158. 146. Bergson, 139–45. 147. Bergson, 139. Bergson referred to the discourse on interior language in his early work Time and Free Will, asking: “Has it not been said that to hear is to speak to oneself?” (44). 148. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 152. 149. Bergson, 146. 150. Bergson, 171. 151. Bergson, 133.

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152. On contemporary and present-day criticisms of Bergson’s views on aphasia, see Missa, “Une critique positive.” 153. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 143–44, citing Bernard, De l’aphasie, 143. 154. Bergson, Matière et mémoire, 129–30 (in the English translation of 1911, “auditory memories” and “auditory images”; for example, Matter and Memory, 146–47). 155. Joseph suspects that Bergson, too, was influenced by Egger. Joseph, Saussure, 495–96. However, Bergson only directly quoted Ballet. See Bergson, Matter and Memory, 144. 156. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 104. 157. Bergson, 102–103, 320. 158. Bergson, 94. 159. Bergson, 165, 166. 160. Bergson, 166–67. 161. On Michał Bergson’s self-definition, see his correspondence with Robert Schumann in 1837–38 in Kopitz, Klein, and Synofzik, Briefwechsel, 99–109. 162. Soulez and Worms, Bergson, 36–37. There is no evidence, though it is possible, that the young Henri-Louis encountered Ferdinand de Saussure, just two years older than him, in Geneva. 163. Extensive material on Bergson’s school and student days has survived, but does not contain any reference to his father’s music. See the list of documents in “Travaux scolaires d’Henri Bergson.” 164. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 20. 165. Bergson, 19. 166. James, Principles of Psychology, 1:26. The switchboard metaphor was anticipated by Hermann von Helmholtz and Ernst Mach (see chapter 4), but James and Bergson diverged from these physicists’ materialist point of view, using the metaphor to describe the mind’s scope for creative action. For both philosophers the brain is, as James put it in a 1902 letter to Bergson, “an organ of filtration for spiritual life.” Madelrieux, “Bergson and Naturalism,” 58. 167. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 19. 168. Bergson, 31, 23. 169. Bertho and Carré, “Le téléphone,” 55–59. 170. Bertho and Carré, 79, 82. 171. Bertho and Carré, 85–86. 172. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 127. 173. Bergson, 220–21. 174. Ribot, Diseases of Memory, 204; see also 62. 175. Ribot, 32–39, esp. 38–39. 176. Ribot, 47. 177. Ribot, 17–18, 28. 178. Ribot, 63. 179. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 93; see also 104. 180. Bergson, 104. 181. Bergson, 89–90. 182. Bergson, 91. 183. See Simon, “‘Two Cultures.’” 184. Ravaisson, La philosophie en France. When Ravaisson, a student of Cousin’s,

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attacked his ideas, Cousin hit back with polemical publications. Simon, “‘Two Cultures,’” 52–53. 185. See Simon, “‘Two Cultures,’” 54–58. 186. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 232; Ravaisson, La philosophie en France, 176. 187. Ravaisson, La philosophie en France, 176–77. 188. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 87. 189. Bergson, 86. 190. Bergson, 101, 106. 191. “Phrase,” Grove Music Online. 192. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 12. 193. Bergson, 14–15. 194. Bergson, 15. Lily Huang, University of Chicago, has recently completed a history of science PhD on Bergson entitled “Metaphor and Metaphysic,” which brilliantly analyzes Bergson’s concept of suggestion. 195. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 100. 196. See Alexandra Kieffer’s comments on Bergson, Debussy, and early twentiethcentury psychology in Brittan et al., “Colloquy,” 563–69. 197. The exception is his “Rapport sur un ouvrage de M. Dauriac,” where, inspired by Dauriac’s essay on Wagner, Bergson set out the audacious hypothesis that Wagner’s musical dramas suggest a “continuité en marche” that outlasts itself. 198. Mercanton, “Une visite à Bergson.” 199. Rolland, Beethoven, 16. 200. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 128. 201. Jankélévitch interprets Bergson’s notion of the subject in light of a Schopenhauerian aesthetics of “Ein-fühlung.” Jankélévitch, “Deux philosophes de la vie,” 418. 202. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 42–47. 203. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 5. 204. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 4. 205. Soulez and Worms, Bergson, 91, 121. Ribot himself did not perform any experiments, but he worked for the establishment of a psychophysiology laboratory at the École pratique des hautes études, which was directed from 1889 by Henry Beaunis, assisted by Alfred Binet from 1891. See Carroy and Plas, “Origins of French Experimental Psychology.” 206. Of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, Bergson adopted the notion that the ideas of space and time are given to the mind a priori. He objected, however, to Kant’s definition of time as a “homogeneous medium” through the category of space and not independently of it. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 232; see also 91–94, 221. 207. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 242–44. 208. Bergson, 274. 209. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 336. 210. Bergson, 306. It has been argued that Bergson was also thinking here of Étienne-Jules Marey’s méthode graphique. The physiologist Marey proposed to measure vital signs (heartbeat, breathing, and so on) with the help of ever-new precision instruments and represent their temporal course graphically. Brain, Pulse of Modernism, 32–36. 211. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 306. 212. Bergson, 342–43.

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213. Lecoq, “Les ‘snobinettes.’” See also Johannet, “Visite à Bergson”; Bistis, “Managing Bergson’s Crowd.” 214. Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher. 215. The conversation is documented in Einstein et al., “Séance du 6 avril 1922.” 216. Einstein et al., “Séance du 6 avril 1922,” 105, 106, 113. 217. Einstein et al., 104. 218. Einstein et al., 107. The published English translation of the discussion includes only Einstein’s contributions. Einstein et al., “Theory of Relativity,” 130. 219. Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity. The dispute between Einstein and Bergson, pursued mainly in writing, split the world of interwar academia. See Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher. 220. Bergson, Creative Mind, 148, 147. 221. Bergson, 50. 222. Snow, Two Cultures. See Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher, 15, 193–94. 223. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 90–91, 92. 224. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 336. 225. Pathé, Souvenirs; Pathé, De Pathé frères à Pathé-cinéma. 226. The interactive website Disquaires de Paris shows how rapidly the market expanded in the French metropolis around 1900: http://disquairesdeparis.fr. 227. Bergson, Mind-Energy, 63 (the article was first published in 1912). Ribot, too, rejected the comparison of memory with photography. Memory, he argued, is much more active than the photograph’s mechanical reproduction. Ribot, Diseases of Memory, 12. 228. Bergson, Mind-Energy, 64. 229. Guyau, “Origin of the Idea of Time,” 118. 230. Guyau, 119. 231. On Guyau and Bergson, see also Jankélévitch, “Deux philosophes de la vie.”

Chapter 4 1. Sigmund Exner to Ernst Mach, June 13, 1894, Deutsches Museum Archiv, Munich, hereafter “DMA,” Ernst Mach papers (Nachlass Ernst Mach), NL 174/1165–001. 2. The “Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte” (Society of German Naturalists and Physicians) was the first nineteenth-century institution of its kind to expressly advocate interdisciplinary dialogue. Schanbacher, Menschen und Ideen. 3. Mach, “Principle of Comparison in Physics.” 4. Mach, Analysis of Sensations, 340–41. 5. Mach’s letter of appointment from the University of Vienna. DMA, NL 174, Konstanzer Abgabe, Box 55. 6. Mach, “Contribution to the History of Acoustics,” 375–76. 7. Mach, “Contribution to the History of Acoustics,” 383. 8. On Mach’s acoustic studies, see Mulligan and Smith, “Mach and Ehrenfels”; Hoffmann and Berz, Über Schall; Hui, Psychophysical Ear, 89–121. 9. Hoffmann, “Ernst Mach in Prag”; Hoffmann, “Ernst Mach in Prag: Eine Wissenschaftskarriere”; Blackmore, Itagaki, and Tanaka, Ernst Mach’s Prague. 10. In fact, Mach’s work built on a long series of predecessors. The first systematic experiments showing the dependence of sound velocity on the conditions of

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the air were carried out at the Académie des sciences in Paris using firearms in 1738. Additional milestones include Henri Regnault’s 1868 experiments performed in gas pipelines. Regnault obtained precise measurements of the supersonic velocity of explosion waves, noting the relationship between the intensity of sound and its velocity. See Krehl, History of Shock Waves, 74, 78, 81, 335. 11. Mach and Salcher, “Photographische Fixirung,” 764. On Mach’s reception of Melsens’s work, see Hoffmann and Berz, “Mach/Salchers Versuch,” 17–20. 12. Melsens, “Sur le passage des projectiles,” 390, Plate 1, figs. 1–22. 13. See Blackmore, Itagaki, and Tanaka, Ernst Mach’s Prague, 175. 14. Mach and Wentzel, “Ein Beitrag zur Mechanik der Explosionen,” 636, 638. 15. Toepler, “Optische Studien,” 34. 16. Krehl and Engemann, “August Toepler,” 1. 17. Toepler, “Optische Studien,” 35. 18. The physicist Heinrich Magnus, for example, insisted that what was visible was not sound but “the air which, heated and perhaps colored by the spark, expands from the position of the spark and is reflected, because the compressed air itself is visible with your apparatus.” Heinrich Magnus to August Toepler, Paris, April 29, 1867, quoted in Krehl and Engemann, “August Toepler,” 7–8. 19. Toepler, “Optische Studien,” 181. 20. Toepler, 182n1. 21. On Mach’s confirmation of the work of Regnault and Toepler in the 1870s, see Mach and Sommer, “Über die Fortpflanzungsgeschwindigkeit.” 22. Mach and Wentzel, “Ein Beitrag zur Mechanik der Explosionen,” 636 and 638. 23. Mach and Salcher, “Photographische Fixirung.” 24. Mach and Salcher, 766–67. 25. Mach and Salcher, 771. 26. Mach and Salcher, 768–70. Mach and Salcher chose the letter w to signify the speed of sound; today, the unit symbol is c. 27. Ackeret, “Der Luftwiderstand,” 179. 28. Berz, “Mach 1,” 396. 29. Peter Salcher to Ernst Mach, March 1887, DMA, NL 174/2728–2867; Salcher, “Photographische Fixirung.” 30. Mach and Salcher, “Über die in Pola und Meppen.” See also the surviving photographic plates in DMA, NL 174/3285–4114. 31. This prompted an anonymous critic in the magazine La Nature to refute the evidential validity of Mach and Salcher’s photographs. Hoffmann, “Paris vs. Prague,” 413. 32. See Hoffmann, “Representing Difference,” 22. 33. Daston and Galison, “Image of Objectivity,” 123. 34. Mach, “Remarks on Scientific Applications.” See Hoffmann, “Paris vs. Prague,” 415. 35. Mach, “Some Phenomena Attending the Flight of Projectiles,” 329. 36. Mach, 329. 37. Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, 120, 12, 111, 89. Helmholtz was intervening in a heated 1840s debate between physicists Simon Ohm and August Seebeck about the nature of tones, confirming Ohm’s law of harmoniously compound tones. 38. Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, 78.

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39. Helmholtz, 219–20. For a detailed analysis of Helmholtz’s theory of hearing, see Kursell, Epistemologie des Hörens. 40. Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, 98. 41. Helmholtz, 78. 42. See Mach’s autobiographical manuscript of 1913 in Blackmore, “Three Autobiographical Manuscripts,” 415; Hui, Psychophysical Ear, 103–4. 43. Mach, Einleitung in die Helmholtz’sche Musiktheorie, 19–31. 44. Mach, Analysis of Sensations, 267. 45. Mach, “Some Phenomena Attending the Flight of Projectiles,” 329. 46. Mach, 331–33. 47. Mach, 330–31. Mach argued that because of varying air resistances, these calculations result in only approximate numbers. 48. Mach, 310. 49. Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, 98 and 94. 50. Helmholtz, “On the Physiological Causes,” 88; Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener, 43–79. 51. Kussmaul, “Disturbances of Speech,” 778–81. 52. See Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 304–6; Füßl and Hagmann, Licht und Schatten, 70. 53. Analyse der Empfindungen was first published in 1886 as Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen. The English translation of 1914, the source of the quotations in this chapter, was made from the 1st German ed. and revised from the 5th German ed. (1906). 54. In this process, “elements” associate to form a “complex of elements.” Mach, Analysis of Sensations, 22. 55. Mach, Analysis of Sensations, 58. 56. Mach, 252–53. 57. Mach, 256. 58. Wundt, Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung, 400. Mach cited Wundt in “Remarks on the Theory of Spatial Vision,” 388. In addition, Mach applied the theory of the accommodation of eye and ear proposed by Hermann von Helmholtz and Bernhard Riemann. See Mach, Einleitung in die Helmholtz’sche Musiktheorie, vi– vii; Hui, Psychophysical Ear, 94. 59. See Wundt, Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung, 410–11. 60. Mach, “Zur Theorie des Gehörorgans,” 296. 61. Mach and Kessel, “Versuche über die Accommodation des Ohres.” 62. Mach, “Remarks on the Theory of Spatial Vision,” 390–91. 63. Mach, Analysis of Sensations, 285. 64. Mach, 286. 65. A considerable proportion of Wagner’s audience was unable to get the tunes out of their heads, whereas Wagner’s critics attacked his reforms of melodic form as inept, indecisive, and void of “independently beautiful musical thoughts”—thus the music critic Eduard Hanslick in his article “Die Oper Lohengrin,” which appeared in the Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung in 1858; quoted and translated in Trippett, Wagner’s Melodies, 28. David Trippett’s brilliant study draws a polyphonic picture of the “infinite criticism” of the Wagnerian melody. 66. Psychologist Christian Ehrenfels took his reading of Mach further, claiming that a tonal form (Tongestalt, Tonvorstellung) is more than the sum of individual sen-

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sations. It arises from the human ability to memorize a temporal series of sensations, to associate them, abstract from them, and create “something new and to a certain degree autonomous.” Such gestalt qualities enable the comparison of sensations that display similar patterns (rhythms, intensities, and pressures), as well as forming part of any process of abstraction. Ehrenfels, “Über Gestaltqualitäten,” 250, 272, 282. 67. Mach, Analysis of Sensations, 256. 68. Mach, 249–50. 69. Mach, 249. 70. Mach, 250. 71. Mach, “Untersuchungen über den Zeitsinn des Ohres,” 145, referring to Johann Friedrich Herbart’s concept of “time measure” (Zeitmaß). Herbart, Psychologische Untersuchungen, 143–83. 72. Mach, Analysis of Sensations, 245. 73. Mach, “Untersuchungen über den Zeitsinn des Ohres,” 142, 144. 74. Helmholtz, On the Sensation of Tones, 98. 75. Mach, Analysis of Sensations, 3, 327. 76. Mach, 320. Mach worked with his Prague colleague Ewald Hering’s neoLamarckian theory of heredity, according to which the ability to crystallize ideas from sensations arises from “the labor of the brain-substance of innumerable generations of ancestors.” Hering, “Memory,” 22. Mach did, though, recognize the political risks of heredity theory, and warned against reducing “everything to [pedigree], as is done, whether from narrow-mindedness or dishonesty, by modern fanatics on the question of race. Surely everyone knows from his own experience what rich psychical acquisitions he owes to his cultural environment.” Mach, Analysis of Sensations, 309; see also 71–72. 77. Mach, “Principle of Comparison in Physics,” 238. 78. Mach, 238–39. 79. Mach, 242. 80. Einstein, “Ernst Mach,” 103. 81. Mach, Science of Mechanics, 222–45 (quotation 229), citing Book 1 of Newton’s Principia (1687) on 192. 82. Mach, Science of Mechanics, 237–38, 255. 83. Mach, 223. 84. Mach, 229–36. 85. Mach, 224. 86. Mach, 232, 510. 87. Loose page in lecture manuscript “Mechanik,” 1895/96, DMA, NL 174/484. 88. Mach, Science of Mechanics, 506 (“space and time are well-ordered systems of sets of sensations”), see also 225–26; Mach, Analysis of Sensations, chaps. 6–7, chap. 12. 89. Mach had been working on the sense of balance since 1873, engaging with studies by the physician Josef Breuer published at almost the same time. The debate is summarized in Mach’s 1897 lecture “On Sensations of Orientation.” Today, Mach’s theory is confirmed by studies of the semicircular canals filled with endolymph, the inertia of which contributes to spatial orientation during motion. 90. Mach, “Sensations of Orientation,” 289–90. 91. The term Körperrelativität, “relativity of bodies,” was coined by Emil Wiechert. Wiechert, “Der Äther im Weltbild der Physik,” 57. 92. Wolters, Mach I, Mach II, 108.

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93. Albert Einstein to Ernst Mach, undated, quoted in Wolters, Mach I, Mach II, 152. Wolters dates the letter to the turn of 1913–14. 94. Einstein, “Prinzipielles zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie,” 241–43. 95. Albert Einstein to Felix Pirani, February 2, 1954, Einstein Archives, no. 17– 447.00, quoted in Renn, “Third Way,” 61. On Einstein’s later revocation of “Mach’s principle,” see Wolters, Mach I, Mach II, 49–50; Gordin, Einstein in Bohemia, 119–221. 96. Holton, “Mach, Einstein and the Search for Reality,” 651; Wolters, Mach I, Mach II, esp. 50, 92, 96, 151. Wolters wishes to expose the preface to Optik (1921) as a forgery. Published posthumously by Mach’s son Ludwig, the preface comments negatively on the theory of relativity. Recent scholarship, however, does consider Mach a possible author of the preface. Gordin, Einstein in Bohemia, 118, 297. 97. Holton, “More on Mach and Einstein.” 98. Renn, “Third Way.” 99. Renn, 70. 100. Mach, “Some Phenomena Attending the Flight of Projectiles,” 310. 101. Mach, Analysis of Sensations, 264. 102. Mach, “Über die Änderung des Tones und der Farbe”; Mach, “Bemerkungen über den Raumsinn des Ohres.” Mach’s observations concern rather small distances. At greater distances, the air absorbs upper partials more than lower ones. 103. Mach, “Bemerkungen über die Function der Ohrmuschel.” 104. Hornbostel and Wertheimer, Vorrichtung zur Bestimmung der Schallrichtung; Hornbostel and Wertheimer, “Über die Wahrnehmung der Schallrichtung.” 105. Mach and Salcher, “Photographische Fixirung,” 779. The same applies to their later research, supported by the Navy section of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial War Ministry in Pola. Mach und Salcher, “Über die in Pola und Meppen.” Mach and Salcher’s correspondence with Friedrich Krupp reveals how extensive this support was. DMA, NL 174/1253–1260. 106. Mach, “Some Phenomena Attending the Flight of Projectiles,” 309. 107. Mach, 326. 108. “Vom Prager Baukomitee zur Verfügung gestellter Entwurfsplan des Auditoriums des Rudolfinums,” DMA, NL 174/4123–3. 109. Mach, “Gutachten zur Akustik des Rudolfinum,” July 17, 1885, DMA, NL 174/2014. 110. Mach’s sketches for the Rudolfinum, DMA, NL 174/4123–1 and 2; Mach’s plans of various concert halls, DMA, NL 174/4123–3a–d. 111. Mach, “Gutachten zur Akustik des Rudolfinum,” July 17, 1885, DMA, NL 174/2014–1. 112. See the inventory of the instruments used in Mach’s Prague laboratory. Twelve-page inventory, DMA, NL 174, Konstanzer Konvolut, Mappe 26. 113. Mach, “Gutachten zur Akustik des Rudolfinum,” July 17, 1885, DMA, NL 174/2014–2. 114. Kern, “Hörsaal im Physiologischen Institut.” 115. Exner, “Über die Akustik von Hörsälen.” The following pages expand on points outlined in Tkaczyk, “The Shot Is Fired Unheard.” 116. Exner, “Über die Akustik von Hörsälen,” 141. 117. Exner, 144. 118. Thompson, Soundscape of Modernity, 18–33; Holl, “Phänomenologie des Schalls.”

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119. Exner, “Über die Akustik von Hörsälen,” 144–46. 120. On this new view of reverberation in nineteenth-century architecture, see Tkaczyk, “Listening in Circles.” 121. See Thompson, Soundscape of Modernity, 33–45. 122. Sabine, “Accuracy of Musical Taste,” 74. 123. Exner, “Über die Akustik von Hörsälen,” 146. 124. Sabine, “Reverberation,” 14–15. 125. Exner, “Über die Akustik von Hörsälen,” 146–47. Whereas Exner emphasized the subjectivity of human auditory perception, Sabine recounted an experiment on reverberation with different musicians who all showed the same sense of loudness. Sabine, “Sense of Loudness,” 129–30. 126. Exner, “Über die Akustik von Hörsälen,” 146. 127. Exner, 149. 128. Helmholtz, “Neue Versuche.” 129. For a detailed discussion of the neuramoebimeter that Exner constructed with the Viennese instrument maker Heinitz, see Schmidgen, Hirn und Zeit, 7–15. 130. Exner, “Experimentelle Untersuchung,” 622, 643–60. 131. Exner, “Über die Akustik von Hörsälen,” 149–50. 132. Exner, 149. 133. Exner, “Ueber einige neue subjective Gesichtserscheinungen”; Exner, “Bemerkungen über intermittirende Netzhautreizung.” 134. Exner, “Über die Akustik von Hörsälen,” 149–50. 135. Urbantschitsch, “Zur Lehre von der Schallempfindung”; Urbantschitsch, “Ueber das An- und Abklingen acustischer Empfindungen.” 136. Exner, “Über die Akustik von Hörsälen,” 149–50. 137. Exner, 146. 138. Exner, “Physiologie der Grosshirnrinde”; Exner, Untersuchungen über die Localisation. 139. Exner, Untersuchungen über die Localisation, 78–79. Herrmann von Helmholtz was the first to use this popular telegraph office metaphor. Later, it was taken up by William James and Henri Bergson, each in different ways. See chapter 3 and Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty, 102. 140. Exner, Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklärung. Olaf Breidbach situates Exner’s approach within the history of brain research. Breidbach, “Neuronale Netze.” 141. Exner, Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklärung, 37–140. For Exner’s readings of Charcot, Freud, and Mach, see 265, 271, 286, 309. 142. Exner, Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklärung, 331. 143. Exner, 268–314. 144. Exner, 331. 145. Exner, “Über die Akustik von Hörsälen,” 148. 146. Exner, 144–49. 147. Exner, 146. Translation of Faust Part I by Anna Swanwick (London: George Bell, 1893). 148. Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, “Bericht über die Arbeiten,” 3. 149. Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, 3. 150. Exner, “Zweiter Bericht über den Stand der Arbeiten.” See also Hoffmann, “Vor dem Apparat.”

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151. The recordings have been published in Schüller, Sound Documents from the Phonogrammarchiv, series 2, disc 2:33 and 39–40. 152. So far only Burkhard Stangl has addressed the connection between the archive and Exner’s physiological research, though with a different emphasis: the parallels between phonography and Exner’s neurological concept of “nerve pathways.” Stangl, Ethnologie im Ohr, 128–300. 153. Exner, Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklärung, 317–18. 154. Exner, 331. Here, Exner is echoing Gustav Fechner’s Vorschule der Ästhetik (1897). According to Fechner’s “aesthetic principle of association,” aesthetic experience never happens only in the here and now. Any sensation is unconsciously associated with memory images of earlier sensations that, in turn, influence aesthetic judgments. See Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty, 106–7. 155. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 197–98. 156. Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty, 103. 157. Jackson, “From Scientific Instruments to Musical Instruments.” 158. Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, 11–12. 159. Mach, Analysis of Sensations, 29–31. 160. Sigmund Exner’s paper “Einige Beobachtungen über Bewegungsnachbilder” (1887) is part of a collection of offprints on physiology from the papers of Ernst Mach (“Physiologie: Sammelband von Sonderdrucken aus dem Besitz von Ernst Mach”) held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Sig. 571–P5787. A list of Mach’s references to Exner can be found in Blackmore et al., Ernst Mach’s Vienna, 301. 161. Mach, “Sensations of Orientation,” 282; references to Exner in 302, 305. 162. Mach, Analysis of Sensations, 370.

Chapter 5 1. Ballet, Le langage intérieur, 47–54. 2. Guthmüller and Klein, introduction to Ästhetik von unten, 5; Brain, “Pulse of Modernism,” 393; Wilke, Müller-Tamm, and Schmidgen, “Empirische Ästhetik um 1900,” 9–11. See also Lanzoni, “Introduction: Emotion and the Sciences,” especially 294–95. 3. The following pages in this chapter expand on points outlined in Tkaczyk, “Whose Larynx Is It?” 4. Gustav Fechner had famously used the concept of “psychophysical parallelism” to argue against the mutual influence between physical and psychological processes; Wundt redefined the concept to ultimately claim the opposite. See Wegener, “Der psychophysische Parallelismus,” 301–2. 5. Stricker, Studien über die Sprachvorstellungen; Stricker, Studien über die Bewegungsvorstellungen. 6. Stricker, Studien über die Bewegungsvorstellungen, 7–10. 7. Stricker, Studien über die Sprachvorstellungen, 2, 70n1. 8. Stricker, 2–3. 9. Wundt’s earliest reference to Stricker’s research on inner speech is found in Wundt, Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 551–53. 10. Pintner, Untersuchungen, 1–7. 11. Pintner, 43. 12. Pintner, 45–53.

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13. Pintner, “Inner Speech.” 14. Pintner, 138–39; Calkins, “Rapid Reading”; Huey, Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading. 15. Pintner, “Inner Speech,” 129–32. 16. See the “explorateurs du larynx” for recording the vertical and horizontal laryngeal movements of dialect speakers in Rousselot, Principes de phonétique expérimentale, 1:98, 99. 17. Pintner also referred to the use of the laryngograph in American reading research such as Curtis, “Automatic Movements of the Larynx,” and Courten, “Involuntary Movements of the Tongue.” In addition, Pintner used methods from experimental psychology, in which the internal movements accompanying reading and memorization were suppressed by counting aloud, holding one’s breath, or listening to music. See Pintner, “Inner Speech,” 136, 151–53. 18. Pintner, “Inner Speech,” 151–53. 19. Pintner, “Oral and Silent Reading.” Pintner’s later career was in differential psychology, where he developed widely applied and (from today’s point of view) somewhat dubious performance tests, including intelligence tests. In these contexts, testing of a person’s reading rate played an increasingly marginal role: Pintner found that reading capacities depend too strongly on a person’s language environment to be suitable for objective measurements of mental intelligence, or only as part of a large battery of different tests. Pintner and Paterson, A Scale of Performance Tests, 11, 18; Pintner, Intelligence Testing, 334; Hollingworth, “Rudolph Pintner.” 20. Ungeheuer, Sprache und Signal, 85–113; Meyer-Kalkus, Stimme und Sprechkünste, 73–125. 21. Sievers, “Über ein neues Hilfsmittel,” 78. 22. Sievers, “Zu Rhythmik und Melodik,” 39. 23. Sievers, “Über Sprachmelodisches,” 110 and 66. 24. Sievers, Ziele und Wege der Schallanalyse, 29; Sievers, “Neues zu den Rutzschen Reaktionen,” 235; Sievers, Metrische Studien IV, 32. Sievers’s typology of voices draws on the rather ad hoc theory of Oberammergau voice instructor Joseph Rutz, problematic due to its crude vocal physiognomy. See Rutz, Musik, Wort und Körper. 25. Sievers, “Neues zu den Rutzschen Reaktionen,” 229; Sievers, Ziele und Wege der Schallanalyse, 29. 26. Sievers, Ziele und Wege der Schallanalyse, 33; Sievers, “Neues zu den Rutzschen Reaktionen,” 235. 27. Peters, “Stimmgebungsstudien I,” 390–92. 28. Peters, 388–90. 29. Peters, 558–61. 30. Sievers, Ziele und Wege der Schallanalyse, 3–4. 31. Becking, Der musikalische Rhythmus, 19. The study was carried out in 1921 but published in 1928. 32. Becking, 20. 33. Inspired by Becking’s work, Sievers thought he could find comparable rhythmic or tempo-related curves in the declamation of historical texts. He visualized further “qualitative gradations” of a literary work, now using rhythmic or temporelated curves (Taktfüllkurven) and signal curves (Signalkurven), as represented by the ninety-six optical signals. Sievers, Ziele und Wege der Schallanalyse, 9, 13–14, 37. On the collaboration between Becking and Sievers, see Stollberg, “Klang-Körper.”

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34. Becking, “Über ein dänisches Schulliederbuch,” 103. 35. Becking, 103, 102. 36. Sievers, “Zur Schallanalyse.” 37. Petersen, Entstehung der Eckermannschen Gespräche, 101, 103; see Rieger, “Medium/Philologie,” 55–66. 38. Petersen, Entstehung der Eckermannschen Gespräche, 100. 39. Petersen, Die Wissenschaft von der Dichtung, 106, 107. 40. García, “On the Invention of the Laryngoscope.” 41. García, “Observations on the Human Voice.” 42. Guttmann, Gymnastik der Stimme; Körner, Die Hygiene der Stimme; Klünder, “Ueber die Genauigkeit der Stimme.” 43. Seiler, Voice in Singing, 11–12. 44. On Seiler’s proposed methods see Steege, “Vocal Culture in the Age of Laryngoscopy.” 45. Seiler, Voice in Singing, 53–65. 46. Seiler, 28. 47. Seiler, Altes und Neues über die Ausbildung des Gesangorganes, 47; Seiler, Voice in Singing, 129. 48. Seiler, Voice in Singing, 20. 49. Stumpf, Tone Psychology, 1:185–86. 50. Stricker, Studien über die Bewegungsvorstellungen; Stricker, Studien über die Sprachvorstellungen. Alternatively, Stumpf may be referring to the works by Schrötter, Vorlesungen über die Krankheiten des Kehlkopfes, or Schnitzler, Klinischer Atlas der Laryngologie, neither yet published at this time. For earlier experimental reproductions of the whole register of the human voice using dissected larynxes, see Müller, Über die Compensation der physischen Kräfte. 51. Stumpf, Tone Psychology, 1:103; on Stricker, see also 1:183. 52. Stumpf, 1:182. 53. Stumpf, 1:219. 54. Stumpf, 1:176. 55. For Wilhelm Wundt’s influence on Ribot, see Carroy and Schmidgen, “Psychologies expérimentales.” 56. Ribot, Psychology of Attention, 29. 57. Ribot, 63. 58. The first to use the famous couplet was British anthropologist and eugenicist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. In 1876, Galton argued that if a pair of twins were to grow up and be nurtured in different environments, they would still show a similar “nature.” Galton, “History of Twins.” In fact, Ribot had already addressed the issue of heredity in 1873 in his dissertation, a widely read study that describes all human activity—from reflex action to unconscious cerebration, sensory perception, and modes of imagination, creation, and reasoning—as being shaped by familial and racial inheritance. Ribot, Heredity. 59. Ribot, Psychology of Attention, 60–61. 60. Ribot, 70–71. 61. Stumpf, Tone Psychology, 1:107. 62. Stumpf, 1:104. 63. Stumpf, 1:105. Julia Kursell notes that Stumpf’s claims about freedom from motor images contradict the methods of nineteenth-century violin teaching, based

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on associationism, which trained young students to develop an ear for musical pitch and the proper violin posture in parallel. Kursell, “From Tone to Tune,” 122, 128. 64. Stumpf, Tone Psychology, 1:103. 65. Stumpf, 1:123–24, 141. 66. Stumpf, 1:7–9. 67. Stumpf, 1:8. 68. Stumpf, “Über Vergleichungen von Tondistanzen,” 445. 69. Stumpf’s “Über Vergleichungen von Tondistanzen” also forms part of a dispute with Wundt and his student Carl Lorenz about whether conclusions on the ability to judge the middle tone between two tones—choosing between several possible tones with tiny pitch variations of 0.4 c/s—can be drawn without taking account of the experimental protocol (the tone systems on which the experiments are based, and the musical abilities of the experimenter and the experimental subject). See Boring, “Psychology of Controversy”; Hui, Psychophysical Ear, especially 126–36. 70. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences. 71. Dilthey in Rothacker, Briefwechsel, 165. 72. Siegert, “Das Leben zählt nicht,” 180–81. 73. The epithet is Riccardo Martinelli’s. Martinelli, “A Philosopher in the Lab.” 74. Jackson, “The Laboratory,” 296. 75. See Hale, Human Science and Social Order. 76. Stumpf referred to his institute’s wide spectrum of neighboring fields (Grenzgebiete) in Stumpf, “Das psychologische Institut.” 77. Christensen, “Erich M. von Hornbostel”; Klotz, Vom tönenden Wirbel menschlichen Tuns; Trippett, “Carl Stumpf.” 78. Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture; Martinelli, “A Philosopher in the Lab”; Pratschke, Gestaltexperimente unterm Bilderhimmel. 79. Steege, An Unnatural Attitude, 27–66. 80. Abraham, “Das absolute Tonbewußtsein.” Abraham, a physician by training, began to work mainly in the field of tone psychology after joining Stumpf’s Institute of Psychology in 1896. The following draws on research presented in Tkaczyk, “The Testing of a Hundred Listeners.” 81. Abraham, “Das absolute Tonbewußtsein,” 1–2, 73. 82. Abraham, 80, 40–44. 83. Preyer, Über die Grenzen der Tonwahrnehmung; Ellis, “On the Sensitiveness of the Ear,” 18, 23. 84. Ellis, “On the Sensitiveness of the Ear,” 24. A first standardization of performance pitch was achieved at the International Conference on Pitch held in Vienna in 1885, where the French diapason normal (A4=435 Hz) was accepted as binding by some European nations. See Jackson, Harmonious Triads, 218–30. 85. See Deutsch, “Absolute Pitch.” 86. Abraham, “Das absolute Tonbewußtsein,” 72. 87. Abraham, 66, 73. 88. Abraham, 48–49. 89. Abraham, 60. 90. Abraham, 5, 46–47, 70–71. 91. Abraham, 48. 92. Abraham, 50–51. 93. Abraham, 48–52.

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94. Abraham, 60–69. 95. Abraham, 70. 96. Abraham, 7–25, 40–45, 54–55. 97. Abraham, 23–25. 98. Abraham, 2. 99. Abraham, 3–4, 34–46. The full questionnaire can be found at https://soundand science.de/node/1222. 100. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 378, 380. 101. Abraham, “Das absolute Tonbewußtsein,” 60, 70. 102. Abraham, 69. 103. Abraham’s work did not engage with contemporary research on auditory cognition in birds, however. The first to study the cerebral functions of a singing canary was Richet, “Expériences sur le cerveau des oiseaux.” For a more general history of transspecies research on musical experience, see Trippett, “Music and the Transhuman Ear.” 104. Stumpf, Origins of Music, 36, 37. 105. Abraham, “Das absolute Tonbewußtsein,” 1–2, 5–6, 62–69. 106. Abraham, 62. 107. Abraham, 68–69. 108. Schünemann designed the tests in collaboration with the aptitude testing office of the Berlin association of professionals (Eignungsprüfstelle des Landesberufsamtes). It is first mentioned in a note in Jahresbericht: Staatlich Akademische Hochschule für Musik Berlin, 1921–1924, 11. 109. Schünemann, “Ueber Musikerziehung.” 110. What he calls the Gesamtpersönlichkeit. Schünemann, “Experimentelle und erkenntnistheoretische Musikerziehung,” 39, 41. 111. Seashore, “Measurement of Musical Talent”; Seashore, Manual of Instructions. 112. Sprung and Sprung, “‘Wir brauchen einen Mann,’” 214. 113. Seashore, “Measurement of Musical Talent,” 133. In Psychology of Music of 1938 (182–98), Seashore proposed to analyze instrumental sounds using a Henrici Harmonic Analyzer and reconstruct them synthetically, functionally anticipating the later RCA synthesizer as designed by his student Harry Olson. Martin Brody, “The Enabling Instrument.” 114. Seashore, “Measurement of Musical Talent,” 137. 115. Seashore, Manual of Instructions. 116. Seashore, Psychology of Musical Talent, 228. 117. Saetveit, Lewis, and Seashore, Revision of the Seashore Measures, 7–13. On the use of the Seashore test in anthropology, industry, and the military, see Saetveit, Lewis, and Seashore, Revision of the Seashore Measures, 47–48. The last version of the tests was Saetveit, Lewis, and Seashore, Seashore Measure of Musical Talents Manual. 118. Seashore, “Individual and Racial Inheritance of Musical Traits.” I thank Alexander W. Cowan for sharing his paper “Eugenics at the Eastman School,” which supplies evidence of Seashore’s involvement in several eugenics-oriented projects in the 1920s and 1930s. 119. Seashore, “Individual and Racial Inheritance of Musical Traits,” 236. 120. Seashore, 233. 121. A different but comparable case is the philosopher Max Scheler, who agreed with Abraham and Hornbostel that biological differences do not exist but built upon

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their interest in the culturally molded ear to argue for “spiritual” differences between European and non-European cultures. See Steege, “Between Race and Culture.” 122. Bingham, Mood Music, 10. 123. Bingham, 12. 124. Diserens, “Influence of Music on Behavior”; Gatewood, “Experiment in the Use of Music.” See Hui, “Muzak-While-You-Work.” 125. At that time, Giese taught at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, where he had begun setting up a psychotechnical laboratory in 1923. For a more critical perspective on Giese’s later work in the field of human engineering, see Tkaczyk, “Archival Traces of Applied Research.” 126. Wilhelm Doegen, “Zahlenreihen und Wörter für psychotechnische Eignungsauslese bei dauernden Störungsreizen nach Prof. Giese (technische Hochschule Stuttgart),” Lautarchiv, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, hereafter “LAHUB”, LA 636. 127. Giese had already investigated the rhythmical optimization of labor, especially female labor, in his 1925 comparative study on “girl culture” in Northern America and Europe. Giese, Girlkultur. 128. Along similar lines, in Methoden der Wirtschaftspsychologie (Methods of economic psychology) of 1927, Giese presented interference devices such as electric buzzers and circular saws and mentioned workplace tests set against a backdrop of radio or conversation. Giese, Methoden der Wirtschaftspsychologie, 457, 460. 129. Herrmann, “Das theatralische Raumerlebnis,” 159. 130. See Corssen, Max Herrmann und die Anfänge der Theaterwissenschaft, 85–92; Hollender, Max Herrmann. 131. Herrmann, “Das theatralische Raumerlebnis,” 160. 132. Herrmann, 160–62. 133. Herrmann, 163. 134. See Hollender, Der Berliner Germanist Max Herrmann, 21, 150–53. 135. Herrmann, Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern; Herrmann’s Jahrmarktsfest has been dubbed a literary study “with Diltheyian ambitions.” Hulfeld, Theatergeschichtsschreibung als kulturelle Praxis, 277. 136. Dilthey, “Transposition, Re-Creating, and Re-Experiencing.” 137. Dilthey. 138. Dilthey, 236. 139. Herrmann, Forschungen zur deutschen Theatergeschichte, 7. 140. Hulfeld, Theatergeschichtsschreibung als kulturelle Praxis, 237–47, 264–81; von Herrmann, Das Archiv der Bühne, 235–53. 141. Herrmann was certainly familiar not only with Stumpf, but also with the popular science publications of Fritz Mauthner, who likewise addressed the “motions in the larynx” that accompany the act of listening to literary performances. “There are people,” Mauthner wrote, “who, when they listen to a crisply accented reading, feel the same articulatory movements that we have observed for silent thought. The vocal artists among professional actors claim to have felt hoarse after listening for a long period.” Mauthner, Sprache und Psychologie, 467. On Herrmann’s reading of Mauthner, see the lecture notes by Johannes Günther on Herrmann’s “Über Theaterkunst,” 1918, reproduced in Corssen, Max Herrmann und die Anfänge der Theaterwissenschaft, 282–91. 142. See Herrmann, “Das theatralische Raumerlebnis,” 156n1.

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143. The Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, for instance, considers the Russian Academy of the Science of Arts in Moscow its historical predecessor.  “The Institute,” Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, updated 2015, www.aesthetics.mpg.de/index.php?id=1535&L=1. 144. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power of Performance, especially 30–37. For a comparison of “transformative aesthetics” across different art forms, see FischerLichte and Wihstutz, Transformative Aesthetics. 145. Sevdalis and Raab, “Empathy”; Decety and Ickes, Social Neuroscience of Empathy; Gazzola, Aziz-Zadeh, and Keysers, “Empathy and the Somatotopic Auditory Mirror System.” On musical audience research, see Overy and Molnar-Szakacs, “Being Together in Time”; Molnar- Szakacs and Overy, “Music and Mirror Neurons”; Wöllner, “Audience Responses.” 146. Proponents of the link are Brodsky et al., “Mental Representation of Music Notation”; Pfordresher, Halpern, and Greenspon, “Sensorimotor Translation in Singing”; it is disputed by Pruitt, Halpern, and Pfordresher, “Covert Singing.” Another study confirmed subvocalization in the test subjects’ musical imagination, but found that despite all subjects saying they felt strong physical reactions in their throat while listening to live performances, none showed laryngeal activities when listening to music in the lab. Bruder and Wöllner, “Subvocalization in Singers.” 147. Such advice builds on research in the cognitive sciences of the past decades, in which—much like a century before—test subjects were asked to speak, listen, and read while simultaneously repeating the meaningless word pair “tah-tah,” humming a melody, or clamping their mouth and tongue in place. Blocking the articulatory movements showed no severe effect on the performance of well-trained speakers, listeners, and readers, but it did interfere with more specific tasks, such as repeating the same word over the course of a minute and imagining hearing a string of letters (e.g., N-M-E) being named aloud. Smith, Wilson, and Reisberg, “Role of Subvocalization,” 1434–37. For a more recent but similar method of speed reading, see Cole, How to Be a Super Reader. 148. Rayner et al., “So Much to Read,” 23, 29. The term “phonological loop” was coined by Baddeley, “Working Memory.”

Chapter 6 1. Shaw, “Preface to Pygmalion,” 109, 112–13. 2. The term “language planning” was introduced in 1971 by Rubin and Jernudd, “Introduction: Language Planning as an Element in Modernization.” Cited in Kaplan and Baldauf, Language Planning, 3. 3. Oudshoorn and Pinch, “Introduction,” 3. See also Woolgar, “Configuring the User”; Kline and Pinch, “Users as Agents of Technological Change”; Lie and Sørensen, Making Technology Our Own?; Kammen, “Do Users Matter?” 4. See Mody, Instrumental Community. 5. In this chapter, terms such as “deafness,” “hard-of-hearing,” and “deaf-mute” are reproduced as they were applied by historical actors at the turn of the twentieth century. I am aware and supportive of the criticism of these terms in Deaf studies today, where an alternative notion of “Deafhood” counters the traditional view of “deafness” as an illness that needs to be cured, medically corrected, or compensated by hearing aids and cochlear implants. See Lane, Mask of Benevolence; Ladd, Under-

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standing Deaf Culture; Bauman and Murray, Deaf Gain; Mills, “Deafness”; Virdi, Hearing Happiness. 6. Gallaudet, “Milan Convention”; Brill, International Congresses on Education of the Deaf; Baynton, Forbidden Signs. 7. In 2019, the International Congress on the Education of the Deaf formally apologized for the “detrimental effects of the Milan conference.” “A New Era”; Moores, “Partners in Progress.” Since the emergence of cochlear implants in the 1980s, oralism has once more gained ascendancy over manualism. For a critical discussion of recent developments, see Hall, Hall, and Caselli, “Deaf Children Need Language.” 8. Hermann Gutzmann, “Über das Stottern” (PhD diss., University of Berlin, October 1887), Archiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, hereafter “UA HUB,” Med. Fak. I, box 0669. 9. On his outpatient clinic at the Charité, see Gutzmann, “Bericht”; Gosepath, “Gutzmann.” 10. Gutzmann, “Über die Tonhöhe der Sprechstimme,” 326–27. 11. Gutzmann referred to Merkel, Physiologie der menschlichen Sprache; Sievers, Grundzüge der Lautphysiologie. See Gutzmann, “Über die Tonhöhe der Sprechstimme,” 193–97. 12. This “phonetic zero point” was posited in Merkel, Anatomie und Physiologie des menschlichen Stimm- und Sprach-Organs, 599; Gutzmann, “Ueber die Tonlage der Sprechstimme,” 4. 13. Paulsen, “Untersuchungen über die Tonhöhe der Sprache”; Gutzmann, “Über die Tonhöhe der Sprechstimme,” 267–69; Gutzmann, “Ueber die Tonlage der Sprechstimme,” 17–18. 14. Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, 153–73. See Gutzmann, “Ueber den sogenannten ‘primären Ton,’” 4–5. 15. Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, 165. 16. Gutzmann, Physiologie der Stimme und Sprache (1909 ed.), 71. 17. The interference apparatus was invented by the physicist Georg Hermann Quincke in 1866. Sauberschwarz’s experiments also built on earlier work by his mentor, Tübingen physiologist Paul von Grützner. Sauberschwarz, “InterferenzVersuche mit Vocalklängen”; Gutzmann, Physiologie der Stimme und Sprache (1909 ed.), 76–79. 18. Sauberschwarz, “Interferenz-Versuche mit Vocalklängen,” 24–25. 19. Gutzmann, Jr., “Vorwort zur zweiten Auflage.” 20. Stumpf, Die Sprachlaute, 36–76. See Kursell, “Musikwissenschaft am Berliner Institut für Psychologie.” 21. Stumpf, Die Sprachlaute, 169–75. 22. Gutzmann, Physiologie der Stimme und Sprache (1928 ed.), 130. 23. Gutzmann, Das Stottern, 1–138. 24. Gutzmann, iv, 303–305, 314–28. 25. Gutzmann, 244. 26. In his preface and commentary to Kussmaul’s work, Gutzmann wrote that he had been influenced by Kussmaul since his student days. Gutzmann, “Vorrede”; Gutzmann, “Kommentar und Ergänzungen.” On Kussmaul, see also Gutzmann, Das Stottern, 244, 259, 265. 27. Gutzmann, Das Stottern, 246. Gutzmann built here on Christfried Jakob’s Atlas des gesunden und kranken Nervensystems of 1895.

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28. Gutzmann, Das Stottern, 359, 358. 29. After Hermann Gutzmann’s death in 1922, his son (of the same name) took over the outpatient clinic and drew up this list for the insurance policy. UA HUB, ChVD.01, box 889, pp. 157–62. 30. Gutzmann, “Verständigung Taubstummer ohne Gebärdensprache.” 31. Gutzmann took inspiration from Austrian otologist Victor Urbantschitsch, who considered residual hearing to result not from ear damage, but from dysfunctional cognitive processes capable of being cured by “listening exercises.” Gutzmann himself doubted that deafness was curable but used similar exercises in speech therapy. Urbantschitsch, Über Hörübungen bei Taubstummheit; Gutzmann, “Ueber die Sprache der Taubstummen,” 1. Although Urbantschitsch’s methods were harshly criticized at the time, auditory training remained an accepted method in rehabilitation programs, especially in conjunction with hearing aids. See Ptok, Meyer, and Ptok, “Hörtraining.” 32. As early as 1891, Gutzmann speculated about the possibility of replacing all medical records, conventionally kept on paper, with phonographic recordings, as individual speech disorders cannot be fully described in alphabetic writing. Gutzmann, “Zur praktischen Verwerthung des Edison’schen Phonographen.” At the time, US physicians likewise designed phonographs specially for hearing tests and speech therapy. See Mills, “Testing Hearing with Speech.” 33. Gutzmann, “Sprachstörungen und Phonograph,” 86, 87. 34. Gutzmann, “Ueber Hörübungen mittelst des Phonographen,” 321. 35. Gutzmann, “Über Hören und Verstehen,” 492. 36. Tkaczyk, “Nur ein Verdacht.” 37. Gutzmann and Hohner, Phonograph, Patent Description, 1. 38. Unable to leave Germany after a visit to the family business in Swabia in 1914, Hohner spent the war there. Most likely, he learned of Gutzmann’s invention during this period and had it patented once the war was over. Berghoff, “Hans Hohner.” 39. Gutzmann, “Die Bedeutung der Phonetik,” 5. Gutzmann was inspired by US phonetician Edward W. Scripture and physiologist Ludimar Hermann, who invented several techniques and machines to visualize the approximate pitch and amplitude of recorded speech as “speech curves.” Scripture, “Speech Curves”; Scripture, “New Machine for Tracing Speech Curves”; Hermann, “Phonophotographische Untersuchungen,” 9–16. 40. Gutzmann, Die soziale Bedeutung der Sprachstörungen, 23. 41. Gutzmann, “Ueber die Sprache der Schwerhörigen und Ertaubten.” 42. Gutzmann’s laryngograph combines devices invented by Dutch physiologist Hendrik Zwaardemaker and Leipzig scientists Felix Krueger and Wilhelm Wirth (on the latter device, see chapter 5). Gutzmann, “Ueber Stellung und Bewegung des Kehlkopfes,” 100–101. 43. Gutzmann, “Ueber die Bedeutung des Vibrationsgefühls,” 220, 226. 44. Gutzmann, 220. 45. Gutzmann, “Ueber die Sprache der Taubstummen”; Gutzmann, “Ein einfaches Kymographion”; Gutzmann, Sprachheilkunde, 43, 148. 46. One exception to this was Gutzmann’s electrotherapy, or “suggestion therapy,” in which he used high-frequency stimulation to immediately overcome speech blocks. Gutzmann, “Stimm- und Sprachstörungen bei Kriegsverletzten,” 327. 47. Gutzmann, Die soziale Bedeutung der Sprachstörungen, 29–35.

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48. Gutzmann, Das Stottern, iii–iv. 49. Gutzmann, Die soziale Bedeutung der Sprachstörungen, 3, 51–69. 50. Gutzmann, “Stimm- und Sprachstörungen im Kriege,” 154–55. 51. Gutzmann, 154. 52. Gutzmann, 158. 53. Gutzmann, 154n1. 54. Gutzmann, “Stimm- und Sprachstörungen bei Kriegsverletzten,” 305. 55. Gutzmann, “Bericht.” 56. Gutzmann, “Stimm- und Sprachstörungen im Kriege,” 154. 57. Stumpf, Die Sprachlaute, v. Die Sprachlaute only came out in 1926, summarizing and expanding on papers that Stumpf published between 1919 and 1927 on the partial structure of speech and on speech comprehension. 58. Stumpf, Die Sprachlaute, 277–80. See Kursell, “Musikwissenschaft am Berliner Institut für Psychologie.” 59. Stumpf, Die Sprachlaute, 49–51, quotation 50. 60. Gutzmann, “Über Hören und Verstehen,” 493. Media scholars Friedrich Kittler and Bernhard Siegert cite Gutzmann’s study for its productive use of the rather poor quality of phonography in the early twentieth century. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 87–88; Siegert, Relais, 217. 61. Gutzmann, “Über Hören und Verstehen,” 493, 499 (original emphasis). 62. Gutzmann, 491, 499. 63. Stumpf, Die Sprachlaute, 234. 64. Stumpf, 50. 65. Stumpf, 50–53, 288–89. On Stumpf’s psychological notion of Einstellung, see Kursell, “Coming to Terms with Sound.” On Husserl’s reading of Stumpf’s notion, see chapter 5. 66. Stumpf, Die Sprachlaute, vi. 67. See Fletcher and Wegel, “Frequency-Sensitivity of Normal Ears”; Fletcher, Speech and Hearing, 255–89. Stumpf repeatedly referred to Fletcher’s work in Die Sprachlaute, 186–88, 237–38, 292–96. 68. In Germany, similarly, engineer Karl Küpfmüller found ways of compressing certain electrical signals in telephone line without impacting on the conversation’s intelligibility. Küpfmüller’s findings were taken up in the 1920s by the electrical engineering company Siemens & Halske. Küpfmüller, “Über Einschwingvorgänge in Wellenfiltern.” On the resulting formula developed by Küpfmüller and Harry Nyquist, which determined the proportional relationship between the number of electric signals and a line’s waveband width, see Gabor, “Theory of Communication,” 429–30. 69. Sterne, MP3, 32–60; Wittje, Age of Electroacoustics, 148–49; Mills, “Do Signals Have Politics?” 70. At the same time, gramophone companies developed various marketing strategies to make consumers believe that sound recordings had a higher fidelity than the live performances of singers and instrumental musicians. Thompson, “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity.” 71. Stumpf, “Das Berliner Phonogrammarchiv,” 245. 72. Stumpf, 227. 73. Stumpf, 238, and more explicitly in Stumpf, Origins of Music. For a critical discussion of Stumpf’s view of what would soon be called “ethnomusicology” and

No t e s t o Pa g e s 1 8 8 –19 4

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“comparative musicology,” see Trippett, “Carl Stumpf”; Liebersohn, Music and the New Global Culture, 168–74. 74. Stumpf, “Das Berliner Phonogrammarchiv,” 239. 75. Stumpf, 233, 234. 76. Abraham and Hornbostel, “Über die Bedeutung des Phonographen,” 228, 222. In a later essay, Hornbostel again warned against accepting the idea of racial differences in sensory perception. Tests of the ability to repeat test tones, he argued, say more about the test subjects’ musical habits—rhythms, melodies, polyphonic structures, and so on—than about their true musical gifts. Hornbostel, “Über vergleichende akustische und musikpsychologische Untersuchungen,” 149, 155. 77. Scheer, “Captive Voices”; Kaplan, “‘Voices of the People’”; Lange, Gefangene Stimmen; Lange, “Archive, Collection, Museum.” 78. In 1931, Doegen’s project was relocated to the University of Berlin. During its many decades at the University, it saw several directors and was attached to different departments until its collecting activities were terminated in 1989 and the holdings declared an archive. The project’s traces still survive as the sound archive (Lautarchiv) at the Humboldt University, Berlin. Around three thousand sound recordings remain from Doegen’s directorship alone, among them Doegen’s teaching records. The recordings have been digitized and catalogued in an online database: www.lautarchiv.hu-berlin.de/en/collections-and-catalog/catalog. On the history of the Lautarchiv, see Mahrenholz, “Lautarchiv of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin”; Hennig, “Wechselnde Formate.” 79. See Stangl, Ethnologie im Ohr, 121–48; Simon, Das Berliner PhonogrammArchiv, 25–46; Ziegler, Die Wachszylinder, 47–55; Verdure, “Les archives de l’enregistrement sonore.” 80. Doegen, Englisch, 4. 81. Meumann’s key reference is Gilbert Ballet (discussed in chapter 2), Meumann, Vorlesungen, 3:552; Meumann, Ökonomie und Technik des Gedächtnisses, 151, 170–89, 218–19, 281–83, 234–66. 82. Doegen, “Die Lautabteilung,” 256. 83. Doegen, Verfahren und Vorrichtung zur wiederholten Wiedergabe von Stellen einer Schallaufzeichnung, Reichspatentamt Berlin, patent no. 447394, class 42g group 6, May 17, 1924, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, Germany, Do2 98/2203. 84. Doegen, Auswahl englischer Prosa und Poesie; Doegen, Auswahl französischer Poesie und Prosa. 85. The following draws on research presented in Tkaczyk, “Hochsprache im Ohr.” 86. Hollmach, Untersuchungen zur Kodifizierung, 19–27. 87. Sweet, Primer of Spoken English, v; Sweet, Practical Study of Languages, 42. The dialects spoken at the University of Oxford and at Eton are also traditionally regarded as privileged British English. See Mugglestone, “Talking Proper,” 1, 14, 18–20. 88. Rousselot, “Études de prononciations parisiennes I.” The abbé’s textbook of “good French pronunciation” aimed to instruct upper-class Parisian children. Rousselot and Laclotte, Précis de prononciation française, 10–12; Bergeron, Voice Lessons, 101–7. 89. The period saw something of a boom in pronunciation recommendations written by church ministers, theater managers, elocutionists at drama schools, and philologists—among them such prominent studies as Johann Wolfgang von

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Goethe’s “Rules for Actors” (1803). These prescriptive works addressed very distinct audiences—churches, schools, theaters—whereas Siebs brought all of these institutions together. See Weithase, Zur Geschichte der gesprochenen deutschen Sprache; Meyer-Kalkus, Stimme und Sprechkünste, 223–50. 90. Siebs, Deutsche Bühnenaussprache (1905 ed.), 87–88. The committee’s debates are described on 37–40. 91. Siebs, Deutsche Bühnenaussprache (1898 ed.), 19–20. 92. Siebs, Deutsche Bühnenaussprache (1910 ed.), 8. 93. Siebs, Deutsche Bühnenaussprache (1922 ed.). 94. The correspondence began in 1926 and documents the discussion between Siebs and Doegen over the editing of the book to accompany the disks, along with the fee still owed to Siebs. Correspondence between Wilhelm Doegen and Theodor Siebs, UAHU, Inst. Lautfo.01, box 7 (1921/1930). 95. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 13. 96. In this respect, their project echoed the nationalistic agenda that Meumann had in mind when he proposed a comprehensive “national education program” for German schoolchildren during World War I. One of Meumann’s major goals was to forge an elaborate and uniform German language syllabus. Language being “of the very greatest significance for the internal unity of the nation,” he insisted, “consistency of language is essential to the commonality of a people’s whole mental world and the foundation of a measure of intellectual and spiritual kinship that can hardly be achieved in any other way.” Meumann, “Die Notwendigkeit einer deutschen Nationalerziehung”; Meumann, “Solidaritätsbewußtsein,” 40, 41. 97. Siebs, Rundfunkaussprache, 2. 98. See, for example, Thierfelder, Deutsch als Weltsprache; Thierfelder, Sprachpolitik und Rundfunk; Michels, “Deutsch als Weltsprache?” 99. Siebs, Rundfunkaussprache, 2. 100. See Schrage, Psychotechnik und Radiophonie, 267–97; Hagen, Das Radio, 113–41. 101. For comparable endeavors in Britain and Italy, see van Kessel, Foreign Cultural Policy. 102. See Weger, “Bühnenaussprache.” 103. Kestenberg, “Denkschrift.” In the following pages I expand on points outlined in Tkaczyk, “Radio Voices and the Formation of Applied Research in the Humanities.” 104. Preußisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung (signed Lammers), to Direktor der Akademischen Hochschule für Musik, June 11, 1926, Universitätsarchiv der Universität der Künste, Berlin, Germany, hereafter “UA UdK,” 1b/1. 105. Schenk, Die Hochschule für Musik, 258. 106. Schenk, 263–65; Grosch, Die Musik der Neuen Sachlichkeit, 205–13; Stange, Die Bedeutung der elektroakustischen Medien, 85–101; Schenk, “Paul Hindemith”; Brilmayer, “Das Trautonium”; Jackson, “Trautonium.” 107. UA UdK, Bestand 1b (Rundfunkversuchsstelle). 108. Elftmann, Georg Schünemann (1884–1945), 26–43; Schenk, Die Hochschule für Musik, 249–56; Koch, Wiedmann, and Ziegler, “Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv.” 109. Schenk, Die Hochschule für Musik, 250. 110. Wittje, Age of Electroacoustics, 115–71.

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111. Georg Schünemann to Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft, March 3, 1930, UA UdK, 1b/1. 112. Schünemann, “Die Aufgaben der Funkversuchsstelle,” 10. 113. Schünemann, 9. 114. Grützmacher, “Eine neue Methode der Klanganalyse.” 115. Grützmacher, 534. 116. Meyer, “Über eine einfache Methode.” 117. Correspondence of Eugen Reiß and George Schünemann, May 1–May 15, 1928, UA UdK, 1b/11, fols. 170–76. 118. Schünemann to Reiß, May 12, 1928, UA UdK, 1b/11, fol. 173. 119. Meyer, “Die Elektroakustik in der Vortragsreihe,” 187–88; Erwin Meyer, “Anfängerkursus Elektroakustik (Tätigkeitsbericht),” UA UdK, 1b/15. 120. Schünemann, “Die Aufgaben der Funkversuchsstelle,” 11. 121. The term “angewandte Sprechkunde” (applied speech studies) was coined by Erich Drach. Drach, Die redenden Künste, 83; Meyer-Kalkus, Stimme und Sprechkünste, 126–30. 122. Schünemann, “Die neue Funkversuchsstelle,” 154. 123. Mönckeberg-Kollmar, “Die Anonymität des Rundfunks,” 190. 124. Alfred Braun, “Tätigkeitsbericht über das vergangene Jahr in der Rundfunkversuchsstelle,” December 12, 1930, UA UdK, 1b/15. 125. At the time, Stille was working for the telegraphy cartel Telegraphie-PatentSyndikat. He let the radio lab use his “steel wire machine” for speech exercises. The relevant correspondence between 1928 and 1930 is in UA UdK, 1b/11, fols. 40, 41, 51, 177. 126. The process is described in correspondence between Grosse, Schünemann, and Gottheiner between April 29, 1929, and August 26, 1933, UA UdK, 1b/8. The later promotion of the films was accompanied by a battle over shares in the patent, during which Grosse, a convinced Nazi, did not hesitate to designate sound film per se as “German intellectual property” and accuse Gottheiner of pursuing “profit-greedy Jewish interests.” Heinz Grosse to Direktor der Hochschule für Musik, August 26, 1933, UA UdK, 1b/8. 127. I. G. Farbenindustrie to Schünemann, March 18, 1933 (signature illegible); Schünemann to I. G. Farbenindustrie, January 24, 1933, UA UdK, 1b/8. 128. Janker, “Röntgentonfilm der Sprache.” 129. Schenk, Die Hochschule für Musik, 258. 130. For the concept of “becoming-media” see Vogl, “Becoming-media.” 131. Schenk, Die Hochschule für Musik, 271–72. 132. Kutsch, Rundfunkwissenschaft im Dritten Reich, 65–280; Birdsall, “Radio Documents.” 133. Gutzmann, “Die Bedeutung der Phonetik,” 2. 134. North, Dialect of Modernism, 3–34, quotation 6. 135. Williams, “Language and the Avant-Garde.”

Chapter 7 1. Darmstaedter, Verzeichnis der Autographensammlung. 2. Sigmund Freud to Ludwig Darmstaedter, July 3, 1910, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Germany, Slg. Darmstaedter 2a 1900, Freud, Sigmund, Blatt 1–2; Ludwig Darms-

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taedter to Ferdinand de Saussure, January 18, 1911, AdS, Ms. fr. 3957, f 6v; Carl Stumpf to Ludwig Darmstaedter, February 18, 1922, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Slg. Darmstaedter 2a 1900, Stumpf, Carl, Blatt 12–13. 3. The donation contract for the “Stimmsammlung zur Autographensammlung Darmstädter [sic],” signed by Darmstaedter on March 7, 1917, is held in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Germany, I. HA Rep. 76, Va Sekt.  2 Tit. X Nr. 250 Bd. 1 (1917–28), documents 3 and 4; see Mahrenholz, “Lautarchiv of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin,” 22–24. 4. Today, the autograph recordings are in the Lautarchiv at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. See Lange, “Archive, Collection, Museum.” 5. Eduard Sievers, “Aus der Edda Völnspa Str. 1–6,” November 24, 1922, LAHUB, Aut 64 (lost); Eduard Sievers, “Fortsetzung von Autophon 65,” and “Fortsetzung und Schluß, Autophon 64 und 65,” November 28, 1922, LAHUB, Aut 65–66. 6. Theodor Siebs, “Die Bedeutung der Bühnenaussprache für die Entwicklung der Hochsprache,” December 4, 1925, LAHUB, LA 565. 7. Ernst Haeckel, “Kurzer Vortrag aus seinem Werke ‘Kristallseelen,’” May 3, 1918, LAHUB, Aut 20/1–2. 8. Albert Einstein, “Bericht seiner Forschungsresultate,” February 4, 1924, LAHUB, Aut 56 (lost). 9. Wilhelm von Bode, “Gedanken über private und öffentliche Kunstsammlungen,” July 17, 1918, LAHUB, Aut 32 (lost). 10. Otto von Gierke, “Das Wesen der menschlichen Verbände,” February 8, 1921, LAHUB, Aut 47 (lost). 11. Max Planck, “Das Wesen der Wissenschaft,” November 7, 1939, LAHUB, LA 1556. 12. Ludwig Darmstaedter, “Intention der Sammlung Darmstädter,” and Wilhelm Doegen, “Möglichkeiten der Sammlung Darmstädter,” November 12, 1917, LAHUB, Aut 0. 13. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 29. 14. Among the few studies on this theme are Smith, Eco-Sonic Media; Devine, Decomposed; Devine and Boudreault-Fournier, Audible Infrastructures. 15. Hornbostel, “Phonographische Methoden.” 16. See Meyer, Acoustic Turn. 17. McAdams and Bigand, Thinking in Sound; Schnupp, Nelken, and King, Auditory Neuroscience. This trend is fostered by the establishment of new research institutions such as the Institute for Auditory Neuroscience in Göttingen and the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University, along with numerous new laboratories in the areas of music perception, cognition, and cochlear implant research. 18. Greher and Heines, Computational Thinking in Sound; Lee et al., “Speech in Affective Computing.” 19. Hermann, Hunt, and Neuhoff, Sonification Handbook; Kramer et al., “Sonification Report”; Schoon and Volmar, Das geschulte Ohr. 20. Pinch and Bijsterveld, Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies; Sterne, Sound Studies Reader; Bull and Back, Auditory Culture Reader; Herzogenrath, Sonic Thinking. 21. Daylight, “Saussure and the Model of Communication”; de Souza, “Semiotics and Human‐Computer Interaction,” 41; Gastaldi, “Why Can Computers Understand Natural Language?”

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Index

The letter f following a page number denotes a figure. Abraham, Karl, 48–50 Abraham, Otto, 153–61, 166–67, 188, 244n80, 245n103, 245n121 Académie des sciences (Paris), 6 Academy of Music (Berlin), 158; radio laboratory at the, 159, 198–207, 213–14 Ackeret, Jakob, 106 acoustics: applied, 11, 102, 124, 134–35, 199; architectural and room, 2, 10–11, 102–3, 121–29, 131, 134, 213; electroacoustics, 11, 187, 199–202; emerging new field of, 103, 135; of the eyes, 61, 78; musical, 11, 134; physical, 103, 135 acoustometer, 9, 11, 126–28, 131, 133–34, 213 actor-network theory, 3 Acusticusstrang (acoustic cord), 4, 17. See also Meynert, Theodor aesthetic perception, 13, 92, 138, 149–51, 164–69, 213. See also experimental aesthetics afterimage, 128–29, 131. See also auditory images and sound-images; memory and mental image Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin), 6 American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), 88, 187 Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim), 41–42, 44 aphasia: Ballet, inner language and, 25–26; Broca and the causes of, 18; Charcot’s lectures on, 23; development theories on, 137, 212; Exner and patients suffer-

ing from, 129; Freud and, 15, 35–36, 39, 52; Gutzmann and, 178, 184; Saussure, Bergson, and research on, 56, 66, 72, 80–81, 84–86, 97–98; Wernicke and the symptom complex of, 29–30, 60 Archives de la parole (Paris), 57, 62–63, 78–79, 99, 190 Archiv-Phonograph, 132–35 associations and associationism: Ballet and, 26, 64; Bergson and, 81–83, 85; Charcot and, 23–24, 29, 52; Exner and aesthetic, 131, 133; Flournoy, Saussure and, 69–74; Freud and, 35–36; Freud, therapy and, 44–49; Gutzmann, language capacity, trauma, 178; Kussmaul and, 27; in the life sciences and humanities, 167; Mach, Kussmaul and, 113–20; Meynert and, 20; schemas of, 84, 98; Stumpf, Abraham and, 148, 154– 60; Wundt, Pintner, 139–40 AT&T. See American Telephone and Telegraph Company attention: aural and auditory, 92, 111, 126, 135, 137–69; evenly suspended, 12, 46, 48; of research to muscle feelings, 138, 154, 169 auditorium: Exner and the acoustics of, 123–31; lectures in, 12, 24, 95–96; Mach and the acoustics of, 121–23 auditory cognition: Charcot, associationism, and, 23–24; Exner and, 10, 130–31, 135; Freud and, 15, 39–40; memory and,

292

auditory cognition (continued) 154; phonography and, 56, 102; research on, 2, 4–7, 13, 52, 137, 167; speech training and, 172, 192; time sensation and, 116; today’s research on, 215–16 auditory cortex: discovery of, 4–5, 17–20; influence of the discovery of, 2, 8, 52, 129–30, 137, 172, 212. See also Acusticusstrang; brain, human auditory images and sound-images: Ballet and, 1, 29–32, 52; Bergson and, 8, 56, 84–86, 90, 97–99; Freud and, 35–40, 42, 45; Kussmaul and, 113–14; Mach and, 116–17; Meynert and, 4; motor imagery and, 137, 139, 150, 154, 159–62, 169; Saussure and, 8, 56, 63–74, 78–80, 97–99; technology and, 213, 216; Wernicke and, 19. See also afterimage Augustine, Saint, 31–32 autograph, 211–12 auxiliary sciences, 40, 47–48, 103 Bahnung (facilitation), 36–37, 41, 52, 130 Ballet, Gilbert: Bergson and, 85–86, 233n155; Bernheim and, 223n69, 226n164; Egger, Saussure and, 64, 66, 97, 251n81; Freud and, 16, 39, 41, 44–46, 48, 232n128; on interior language, 1–2, 7–8, 23–35, 137, 167; methods of, 50–53 Becking, Gustav, 143–45 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 93, 150, 157, 226n158 Bell, Alexander Melville, 171 bells: in experiments, 21, 157; metal of, 23–24; sound of, 42, 80, 92, 157. See also under Charcot, Jean Martin Bell Telephone Company. See American Telephone and Telegraph Company Bergson, Henri, 3, 8, 56, 137, 216; auditory images and, 84–86, 117, 213; brain metaphors of, 87–91, 240n139; at the Collège de France, 94–96; concept of the image of, 81–84; Einstein and, 96–97; Exner and, 130; fictive dialogue between Saussure and, 97–100; philosophy of, 79–81; two cultures and, 91–94 Bergson, Michał, 87 Bernard, Claude, 21, 30

Index

Bernheim, Hippolyte, 223n69, 226n164 Blattner, Ludwig, 204 body-mind dualism, 7, 81 Bonald, Louis de, 31–32, 64, 66 Bonnet, Charles, 31 brain, human: cognitive processes not restricted to the, 137, 139; critique of positivist research on the, 56, 81, 99; localization of sensory impressions and processing in the, 34–36, 80–82, 113, 129–30; localization of speech faculty in the, 4–5, 15, 17–21, 25–28, 36, 60; metaphors for the, 87–91, 99; methods and technologies of research on the, 16, 34, 56, 136; plasticity of the, 28, 122, 130, 207, 214; study of lesions of the, 17, 18, 85–86, 184; training of the, 13, 172, 177–79. See also associations and associationism; neuroscience Braun, Alfred, 203, 204f, 206–7 Bréal, Michel, 61–62, 99, 152, 216 Breuer, Josef, 40–42, 44, 238n89 Broca, Pierre Paul, 97; Ballet and, 26, 52; Bergson, 81; Broca’s area, 17–19; Charcot and, 21; Saussure and, 72 Brücke, Ernst Wilhelm von, 16, 129 Brunot, Ferdinand, 57, 62–63, 78–79, 99, 213. See also Archives de la parole Charcot, Jean Martin, 3, 97–98, 211, 216; auditory triggers and, 20–23, 45, 213; Ballet and, 8, 25–30, 34; bell model of, 23–25, 29, 45, 52, 66, 84, 116, 154; Bergson and, 81, 84–86, 92; Freud and, 15–16, 25, 34–35, 39, 41, 45, 51–52 Charité (university hospital, Berlin), 173– 74, 178–80, 185 Charles-Ferdinand University (Prague). See University of Prague chronograph, 61, 112, 126 chronometer, 9, 80, 117, 126 Collège de France (Paris), 8, 61–62, 81, 94–95, 99, 149 colonialism, 9, 188, 189, 215 communication: capacity and practice of, 26, 28; circuit of, 73–74, 78, 97–98, 214; Freud’s psychoanalytical model of, 38–40, 46; new media of, 9, 12, 172,

Index

199, 208. See also names of specific communication media comparative listening: applied research and, 134–36; databases as a tool for, 131–33; Mach’s physics and, 10, 101–2, 117–20; sound localization and, 120–23 Comte, Auguste, 91 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 31, 64 Cousin, Victor, 91 Darmstaedter, Ludwig, 211–12 deaf education, 61, 173, 181, 184 Debussy, Claude, 93, 161; Pelléas et Mélisande, 93 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 151–52, 165–66, 211 disciplines: bridging of, 102–3, 135, 138; formation of, 2–7, 9–13, 171, 216; specialization of, 101. See also humanities; two cultures; and names of specific disciplines Doegen, Wilhelm: Darmstaedter and voice portraits, 211–13; Giese and, 162, 163f; language education, Lautabteilung, and, 13, 171, 190–97, 199, 207–8, Phonographic Commission and, 189f Doppelknall. See double report Doppler, Christian, 120 Doppler effect, 10, 103, 120–22 double report, 10, 111–2, 121 dreams: acoustic images in, 42–44, 52; notation and recording of, 44, 49 Ebbinghaus, Hermann, 152, 227n5 École normale supérieure (Paris), 79, 91, 94 École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), 61; laboratory for experimental and comparative psychology at the, 94 Edison, Thomas Alva, 9, 55, 61, 99, 100, 156, 213. See also phonograph and phonography Edison Company, 50, 161, 180 Egger, Victor: Ballet and, 29–30; inner speech and, 63–64, 86, 97; Saussure and, 8, 65f, 66, 68, 74, 76, 78. See also inner speech Einstein, Albert, 10, 212; Bergson and,

293

80, 96–97; Mach and, 118–20. See also relativity electricity: electric stimulation, 129, 155; electrotherapy, 23, 249n46; in experimentation, 105, 200–1; as a metaphor, 89–91, 99 electroacoustics, 11, 187, 199–202 Ellis, Alexander J., 153–54, 171 environment: cultural, 117, 138, 151; sonic and acoustic, 9, 29, 136; work, 162 EPHE. See École pratique des hautes études epistemologies: of different disciplines, 2, 9; sonic, 6, 212 eugenics, 157, 160, 243n58 exactitude, 47, 56, 102, 134–35, 213 Exner, Sigmund, 3, 211, 213, 214; acoustometer and, 126–28, 131; architectural acoustics and, 123–26, 131; auditory after-images and, 128–30; Mach and, 10–11, 101–2, 117, 134–36; Phonogram Archive in Vienna and, 87, 132–34 experimental aesthetics, 12, 138, 151, 167–68 experimental psychology, 12, 30, 98, 115, 152, 164, 166–67; comparative and, 81, 94; Wilhelm Wundt and, 12, 139–40, 151. See also laboratory; University of Leipzig Fechner, Gustav, 241n154, 241n4 First World War: research during the, 121, 171, 199; speech training for invalids of the, 13, 171, 183–85, 209; sound recording with prisoners of the, 189–90, 207 Flourens, Pierre, 17 Flournoy, Théodore, 69–72, 78 Foucault, Michel, 7 frequencies, 129, 121, 186–87 Freud, Sigmund, 211, 216; Ballet and, 8, 25, 30, 34, 52–53; Bergson and, 81, 93, 98; Charcot and, 20–25, 51–52; interpretation of dreams and music, 40–44; on language processing and wordpresentations, 35–40; Mach and, 103, 130; Meynert and, 16–17, 20; network of contemporaries and, 3; phonography and, 56, 213; reception of, 47–51; talking cure and evenly suspended attention, and, 12, 15–16, 44–47, 214

294

friction machine, 122, 126 Friedrich Wilhelm University (Berlin). See University of Berlin Gall, Franz Josef, 17 Galton, Francis, 9, 157, 243n58 García, Manuel P. Rodríguez, 146, 147f, 167 General Hospital (Vienna), laboratory of cerebral anatomy, 15–17, 20, 35, 40 German Stage Association, 194–95 gestalt: psychology of, 116, 153; of speech sounds, 186–87; tonal, 5, 103, 115, 117, 133 Giese, Fritz, 162, 163f, 164f, 167 gong, 8, 21, 23, 45 Gottheiner, Victor, 205 gramophones: production of, 99; use as a recording device, 132, 189, 211–12; use for music playing, 93, 162; use in language learning and standardization, 192–93, 195, 198; use in speech therapy, 214 Grosse, Heinz, 205 Grützmacher, Martin, 200, 201f Gutzmann, Albert, 173 Gutzmann, Hermann, Jr., 177 Gutzmann, Hermann, Sr., 13, 171, 204, 208, 211, 213–14; Doegen and, 192; interference apparatus and, 176–77; oralism and, 173–75; speech training and, 175–78; Stumpf and, 185–87; technologies of speech education and, 178–83; war-injured people and, 183–85 Guyau, Jean-Marie, 55–56, 100 Hanslick, Eduard, 41, 43, 237n65 Havet, Louis, 61–62, 99, 152, 216 hearing cap, 38–40 Heinrich Hertz Institute for Oscillation Research (HHI, Berlin), 199–200, 202 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 3, 233n166; ear as a precision instrument, 134; Exner, student of, 128; Mach, tone sensations, and, 111–13, 116, 135, 151; Sauveur and, 103; theory of vowels and, 175, 186 Herrmann, Max, 13, 164–68 HHI. See Heinrich Hertz Institute for Oscillation Research Hirsch Weir, Ruth, 51

Index

history of medicine, 8, 30, 32–34, 48 Hitzig, Eduard, 60, 68, 85 Hôpital de la Salpêtrière. See Salpêtrière Hornbostel, Erich von, 121, 188, 215 humanities: applied, 11–13, 102, 199, 205–7; competition in the, 168; laboratory, 151– 53, 169, 185, 205, 208; new disciplines of the, 138, 167. See also two cultures Husserl, Edmund, 40, 153 Huygens, Christiaan, 118 hypnosis: Freud, Breuer, and, 35, 44, 45; at the Salpêtrière, 8, 21, 23, 26, 45, 52 hysteria: Charcot and, 21, 35, 213; Freud’s treatment of, 15, 42; Studies in, 40–41 iconic turn, 14, 219n7 idealism (philosophy), 82, 130 ideas: Bergson and the immaterial world of, 84–86, 98; music and, 43; primacy of, 31–32, 64–67; Saussure and the mediation of, 80, 97 IG Farben, 205 Imperial Marine Academy (Fiume), 105 inheritance and innateness: of associations, 69, 82; of inner language and ideas, 32; of knowledge and cognition, 117, 130, 167– 68; of musicality, 146–49, 154–61, 214 inner speech: Ballet and, 1–2, 8, 26, 29–32, 52, 97, 167; crib talk and, 51; Egger and, 29–30, 64–68, 74, 76, 86, 97; Freud and, 15, 20, 40–41, 46; muscle feelings and, 12, 137; reading and, 140–42; rising interest in, 5, 7–8, 192; Saussure and, 64–68 instruments: acoustic and musical, 10, 111, 134, 156, 213; as auxiliaries, 117; Gutzmann’s use of, 178–83; makers of, 11, 21–23, 62, 215; precision, 62, 102, 134– 35; at the Salpêtrière, 8, 21, 23–24. See also names of specific instruments interference apparatus, 175–77, 186–87, 190, 200–201 interior language: Ballet and 8, 30–32, 34; Freud, Ballet, and, 16, 36, 39, 51–52; Saussure and, 64–66, 86 International Exposition of Electricity (Paris, 1881), 104 introspection. See self-observation

Index

Jakobson, Roman, 51 James, William, 88, 240n139 Janker, Robert, 205, 206f Jaroschka, Gottlieb, 132 Jung, Carl Gustav, 48, 50 Kant, Immanuel, 28, 116, 234n206 Kestenberg, Leo, 198 Kittler, Friedrich, 9, 55–56 knowledge: scientific and humanistic, 8, 48, 95–98; techniques of, 11–14, 48, 123, 138, 172, 190, 207, 214; theoretical and practical, 3, 11, 215 Koenig, Rudolph, 21–22 Krueger, Felix, 140, 141f Krupp (manufacturer), 108 Kussmaul, Adolf: brain plasticity and, 26–28; Gutzmann and, 187–88; Mach’s reception of, 113–14, 119 kymograph, 141–42, 177–78, 181 laboratory, 143, 152, 187. See also humanities: laboratory; and names of specific institutions language: acquisition of, 32, 85, 178, 192; living, 61–63; national, 62, 172, 197, 208; philosophy of, 30–34, 60, 64–66; planning and standardization, 12–13, 171– 209, 212; procession of, 5, 27, 35–37, 52, 60, 78, 80, 172, 178, 192, 212; Saussure’s theory of, 8, 58–59, 63–69, 71–74, 116; teaching and education, 171, 173, 177, 192–99, 212; Wernicke and the faculties of, 19–20, 60. See also interior language; linguistics; speech laryngograph, 140, 141f, 178, 181, 183f laryngoscope, 146, 147f larynx: covert activity of the, 167–69; inner speech and the, 12, 85, 137, 139– 42; listening and the, 5, 12; memory of the, 148, 153–55, 160; movements during speech of the, 175, 181–83, 205; musicality and the, 145–51, 153–61, 165; reading and the, 139–45, 151; studies of vowels and the, 62, 175. See also muscle feelings Latour, Bruno, 3 Lautabteilung of the Prussian State Library

295

(Berlin), 162, 190–93, 197, 199, 207, 211–12 Lauthalter (sound holder), 193, 194f lecture hall. See auditorium Lindström Company, 50, 180 linguistics: experimental, 61–62, 68, 76; external and internal, 75; positioning between sciences and humanities, 8, 58–60; synchronic and diachronic; 74–75, 97–98 loudspeaker, 9, 199–200, 214 Mach, Ernst, 3, 137, 211, 214, 216; auditory observation and, 109–17; comparative listening, architectural acoustics and, 120–23; Einstein and, 118–20; Exner and, 101–2, 123–26, 130, 133–36; multidisciplinary program of, 102–3; psychology of association and, 113– 17; relativity of sound and, 103–4, 117–19; shock waves experiments and schlieren photography, 10–11, 104–9, 121, 213 Mach number, 103–4, 106, 113. See also Mach, Ernst magnetic recording, 51, 112, 203, 208. See also tape Marey, Étienne-Jules, 61–62, 91, 99, 152, 234n210 material: for construction, 124; exploitation and, 188, 215; infrastructures, 3, 215; of media, 23, 205; turn, 5 media: becoming, 10, 205; criticism of, 56; new, 9, 12, 172, 208; sound, 10, 14, 215; technology, 46, 100, 209, 214; use of, 12, 172, 208 Meistersinger, 42–43 Melsens, Louis-Henri-Frédéric, 104 memory: auditory, 5, 8, 23, 45, 51, 79, 128– 33, 137, 150, 197, 212–13; linguistic, 8; location of, 81–82, 130, 148; musical, 153, 212; phonograph and, 51, 55–56, 100 memory and mental images: Bergson and, 81–87, 90–91, 98; Charcot’s bell model and, 52, 116; Exner and, 129–31, 133; Guyau and, 100. See also afterimage; auditory images and sound-images metaphysics, 8, 80–82, 92, 98

296

metronome, 122, 134 Meumann, Ernst, 192, 227n5 Meyer, Erwin, 200, 202 Meynert, Theodor: association theory and, 20–21, 23, 60, 98; Ballet, Kussmaul and, 25, 27–28, 52; Exner and, 129; Freud and, 15, 20, 35, 40; localization of the auditory cortex, 4–5, 16–17, 19, 28, 91, 212–13 microphones: as new media, 9, 46, 51, 199, 214; speaking at, 202–5, 214; testing of, 200–202 Milan Conference (1880), 173 Mönckeberg-Kollmar, Vilma, 203 Münsterberg, Hugo, 152 muscle feelings, 12, 115, 137–40, 150, 158, 167 music: experience of, 92–94, 115, 138, 150–51, 153, 156; mood music, 161; physical effect of, 138, 146–49, 161–64; transposition of, 157; waltz music, 41. See also Academy of Music; and names of specific musical instruments musicality, 146–49, 153–61, 167, 214 musicology, 138, 153, 167–68, 250n73 Musikverein (Vienna), 122 Nacherleben (secret reexperiencing), 164–66 national identity, 172, 185, 207–8. See also under language Nazism, 165, 198, 206–8, 212, 214 neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker), 59, 61 neuramoebimeter, 9, 128 neuroanatomy: associationism and, 23, 113, 148, 160; brain dissection and, 21, 26; language localization and, 20–21, 25–26, 52, 137, 212; reception and critique of, 5, 20, 36, 60, 80–81, 85 neuropathology, 20–21, 23, 31, 41 neurophysiology: associations and, 81, 155f; brain plasticity and, 207, 214; Exner and, 129–30, 136; Freud and, 35–36, 40, 45 neuroscience, auditory, 4–5, 129 Newton, Isaac, 118–19 noise, 111, 116, 128, 134

Index

objectivity: aural, 102, 133; mechanical, 50– 51, 108, 128, 180, 188; of methods, 28, 53, 124, 132–35, 140, 168 Odeon company, 192, 193f opera, 42–43, 87, 93, 133, 146. See also Debussy, Claude; Wagner, Richard organ (instrument), 111 organ pipe, 126, 177 Parlograph, 9, 50, 180 parole intérieure. See inner speech Pelléas et Mélisande, 93 Peters, Julius, 13 Peters, Willy E., 142–44, 167 Petersen, Julius, 145, 164–65 phenomenology, 40, 153 philosophy: of life, 92, 94, 97–98; Western, 31, 81 phonautograph, 9, 61, 229 phonemes: auditory and motor images and, 67–68, 72, 78; definition of, 59, 61– 62; pronunciation of, 175, 180; writing of, 70, 78 phonetic writing and transcription, 37, 192 phoniatrics, 2, 13, 173 phonocentrism, 40 Phonogram Archive (Berlin), 188, 190, 199, 215 Phonogram Archive (Vienna), 57, 78, 102, 132, 190 phonograph and phonography: critique of, 47, 49, 55–56, 79, 99–100; exactitude of, 46–47, 56; new technology and development of, 9, 51, 55–56, 137, 182–83, 208, 213; recordings of language and music, 188–92, 215; use in linguistics, 57–58, 61–63; use in testing, 143, 156, 159, 186– 88; use in therapy, 13, 49–51, 173, 178–80. See also Archiv-Phonograph; Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission; and names of specific phonogram archives phonographic regime, 9, 55–56 photography of sound, 9, 108–9, 208. See also Mach, Ernst: shock waves experiments; schlieren piano: as a brain metaphor, 87–88, 91, 107;

Index

as a metaphor for auditory stimulation, 111 Pintner, Rudolf: speed reading and, 139– 42, 167–68, 214; Wundt and, 142, 151, 165 pitch: awareness in speaking, 175, 180; in contemporary music, 150; discrimination of, 111, 114, 129, 148; perfect or absolute, 153–59, 167, 175; standardization of, 23, 134, 153; tone intervals and, 115; of voices, 49, 85, 142–43, 175 precision. See exactitude Preyer, William Thierry, 153–54 pronunciation: rules and standards for, 193–98, 203, 212, 214; study of individual nuances in, 49, 57, 62, 175 Prussia: ministries and similar organs in, 184, 189, 192, 198; state of, 108, 183–4, 198–99. See also Lautabteilung; Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission psychoacoustics, 187 psychoanalysis: as an adjunct to medicine, 47, 103; and literature, 8, 34, 50; praxis of, 15, 45–51, 53, 102; the unconscious in, 93 psycholinguism, 60, 68 psychophysical parallelism, 139, 149, 221n20 racism, 160–61, 188, 208, 214, 238n76 radio: as a new medium, 9, 161, 197–98, 207–8; speech in, 13, 197–207, 214; studies and research on, 2, 173, 199, 207; technology of, 200–202. See also Academy of Music (Berlin): radio laboratory at the; Schünemann, Georg Ravaisson, Félix, 91–92 reaction time, 128–31 reading: silent, 139–42; speed, 140, 151, 167, 169, 214 recording technologies. See names of specific recording devices Reik, Theodor, 49–50, 53 Reisz, Eugen, 202 relativity, 10, 80, 96, 117–20. See also Einstein, Albert resonator, 61, 111, 156, 178, 180–82 reverberation, 10–11, 123–29, 131, 213 rhythm: of the heart, 61; in music, 41,

297

92–93, 115–16, 144, 153, 158, 161–62, 215; in speech, 49, 152–53, 192, 195, 203; time and, 92, 94; of work, 161–62, 167 Ribot, Théodule: aesthetic perception and, 149, 167; Bergson and, 8, 81–83, 90–91, 93–94; Stumpf and, 149–50 Rivarol, Antoine de, 31, 64 Roedemeyer, Friedrichkarl, 207 Rogers, Carl R., 50 Rosapelly, Charles, 61–62, 152 Rousselot, Pierre-Jean, 62, 99, 140, 152, 216 Royal Academy of the Sciences (Vienna), 132 Royal Imperial Society of Physicians, 4 Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, 189–90 Rudolfinum (Prague), 121–22, 126 Sabine, Clement Wallace, 124–26, 131 Salcher, Peter, 105–9, 121 Salpêtrière (Paris): Ballet and the, 1, 7, 25–30, 44; Charcot’s experiments and the, 8, 21–23, 45; Freud and the, 8, 15, 20–21, 34, 44–45; School of the, 29–30, 34, 44, 50 Sauberschwarz, Eduard, 175–76, 176f Saussure, Ferdinand de, 3, 8, 29, 97, 211, 214, 216; on auditory images, 63–69, 71–74; Bergson and, 79–80, 86, 97–100; Flournoy and, 69–71; language as a living entity and, 61–63, 197; linguistics between sciences and humanities, 56, 58–60, 74–76; Mach and, 117, 137; notebooks, drawings, and, 76–79; phonography and, 57–58, 213 Sauveur, Joseph, 103 schlieren, observation and photography of, 10, 104–6, 213 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 43, 226n158, 226n161, 234n201 Schünemann, Georg: aptitude test for musicians of, 158–59, 167; Berlin radio lab and, 198–207, 214; radio speech and, 12, 171, 202–5; radio technology and, 200–202, 213; research agenda of, 208 Scott de Martinville, Léon, 61 Seashore, Carl Emil, 159–61, 167, 214

298

Seiler, Emma, 146–48, 167 self-observation: Ballet, inner speech, and, 8, 28–29, 34, 50, 137; critique of, 28–29, 76, 91, 140, 148; Freud’s adaption of, 46, 52–53; as a research method, 2, 13, 71, 152, 156 Shaw, George Bernard, 171 shock waves, 2, 10, 102–4, 109, 112, 117–18, 120, 122 Siebs, Theodor: in early twentieth-century Berlin, 13, 171; and German standard pronunciation, 193–98, 203, 214; recording of, 212; research in the humanities, 208 Siemens & Halske, 101, 250n68 Sievers, Eduard: committee on pronunciation rules and, 194; Herrmann and, 165; sound and voice analysis, 142–45, 151, 167; sound recording of, 212; at the University of Leipzig, 12 sign language, 173 siren (instrument), 111, 134, 156, 178, 180 Snow, C. P., 97, 220n22 Société française d’histoire de la médecine, 32–34 Society of German Naturalists and Physicians (Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte), 101, 136 sonic boom. See double report sonic unconscious, 8, 12, 15–16, 29–30, 35–49 sound: analysis, 134, 142–45, 177, 186, 200; archiving, 57, 62–63, 132–35, 188, 207, 209; binaural localization of, 3, 10, 120– 21; cultures, 55–56, 188–90, 205; databases of, 131–32; field, 4, 17, 19, 27–28; photography, 9–10, 104–10, 112, 121, 208, 213; propagation, 10, 105, 122; relativity of, 117–20; shifts, 59, 145; speed of, 10, 103–6, 110–12, 188–19, 213; synthetic, 177. See also autograph; music; and names of specific sound archives sound department. See Lautabteilung sound recording: archiving of, 132; in linguistics, 57, 79; of music, 161, 190; in psychotherapy, 50–51; in speech therapy, 180–81; technologies of, 3, 9,

Index

213. See also names of specific recording devices speech: disorders of, 2, 17, 60, 173, 178–85, 192, 207; radio, 198–205, 214; recognition, 216; suppressed, 26–28, 140; therapy of, 13, 171–86, 198, 207–8, 212– 13. See also inner speech spiritualism, 91–92 Steinthal, Heymann, 60, 68, 228n32 Stille, Curt, 204 Stricker, Salomon, 139–40, 148, 160, 167 structuralism, 7–8, 40, 58, 68 Stumpf, Carl: Abraham, perfect pitch, and, 153–58; Darmstaedter’s autograph collection and, 211; Gutzmann and, 177; Herrmann and, 165–66; Institute of Psychology, laboratory humanities, and, 12, 145, 151–53, 185, 205; interest in speech organs and, 167; network of contemporaries and, 3, 161, 171; Phonogram Archive, Phonographic Commission, and, 189–90; Schünemann, radio laboratory, and, 199–201, 205; Seashore, musical testing, and, 158–61; speech perception and, 186–88; tone psychology and, 145–46, 148–51, 213; unexpected application of research of, 214 stuttering, 52, 173, 177–8, 184 subvocalization, 168–69 suggestion, techniques of, 34–35, 45–46 Sweet, Henry, 171, 192 symptoms: of aphasia, 19–20; Ballet’s studies of transhistorical, 34; Charcot’s studies of, 21, 35, 51; Freud’s studies of, 41–42, 44, 46, 51–53 synesthesia, 69–71 tachistoscope, 139 talking cure, 15–16, 24, 34, 44–45, 53, 214 Tannhäuser, 115 tape, 51, 53, 204 telegraphy: administration of, 88; as a brain metaphor, 130–31; expertise in, 198, 200; paper for, 215 telephony: as communication media, 9, 52, 207; in experimentation, 126–27, 131,

Index

186–87; industry of, 88, 187, 199; as a metaphor for a listening technique, 46; as a metaphor for the brain, 88, 91; as a metaphor for the psyche, 38; technology of, 37, 88–89, 187, 200 telescope, 108, 109, 117 theater: acoustics of, 123–24; culture of, 1, 25, 166; individual houses, performances, and visits to, 1, 29, 47, 115; listening in, 12, 121, 138, 149, 164–68; pronunciation and declamation in, 194–95, 198, 203; theater studies, 2, 138, 152, 166–68. See also German Stage Association; opera; University of Berlin: Institute of Theater Studies at the therapy. See electricity: electrotherapy; speech: therapy of time: Bergson, Einstein, and the relativity of, 94–97; Bergson, Ribot, and the experience of, 80, 90–92; Mach and the sense of, 114–19. See also reaction time; reverberation Toepler, August, 104–5, 109 tone: consciousness, 153–60; pure, 111, 156, 159; sensation of, 111, 115–17, 120–21, 150–51. See also pitch tonometer, 9, 178, 180 Trautonium, 198 Trautwein, Friedrich, 198, 207 tuning fork: Abraham’s experiments with, 158–59; broad use in research of, 9, 61, 111, 208; Gutzmann’s use of, 178, 180; Helmholtz’s experiments with, 111; use in the Salpêtrière, 8, 21–23, 26, 45, 52, 213 two cultures, 2, 6–7, 91, 97, 120 University of Berlin, 60, 145, 152; Institute of Psychology at the, 12, 145, 151, 159, 177, 185, 199–200; Institute of Theater Studies at the, 13, 164; laboratory research at the, 152–53, 156, 185, 205; phonogram archive at the, 188. See also Charité University of Geneva, 57, 59, 69, 79 University of Graz, 103, 105, 111

299

University of Leipzig: experimental psychology laboratory at the, 12, 139– 40, 142, 151–52; Saussure at the, 59, 61; Sievers at the, 12 University of Prague, 103–4, 146; physics laboratory at the, 104, 122–23 University of Strasbourg, 26, 113 University of Vienna: Exner and Mach at, 10, 101–3, 111, 123, 125f, 129; Freud at, 16, 20, 35; laboratory at the, 16, 128–29; Phonogram Archive and, 132 Urbantschitsch, Victor, 129, 249n31 Vaïsse, Léon, 61–62, 108, 152 violin, 21, 61, 150 voice: disorders and education of, 175–77, 180–85, 205–8; inner, 1–2, 29–30, 44, 49, 169; phenomenology and, 40; portraits and recordings of the, 132, 188–90, 211–12; in psychotherapy, 44, 52–53; recreation of an author’s, 142–45, 151, 164, 212; in singing, 146–48, 178 vowels: associations with, 69, 71; pronunciation of, 95–96, 203; system in linguistics, 59; theory of, 175, 186 Vygotsky, Lev, 51 Wagner, Richard, 43, 132–34; Meistersinger, 42–43; Tannhäuser, 115 war: Nazi propaganda during the, 206–7; theoretical discourse in postwar Germany, 5–6; use of research for military and, 121, 134, 158, 160. See also First World War Weimar Republic, 153, 171, 197–98, 205, 209, 212 Wernicke, Carl: aphasia research and, 97–98; Bergson, associationism, and, 84–85; localization of speech faculty in the brain, 19–21, 25; Saussure, the Berlin language controversy, and, 60, 68 Wertheimer, Max, 121 whistle (instrument), 9, 158, 180 Whitney, William Dwight, 60, 69, 228n26, 228n32 Wirth, Wilhelm, 140, 141f

300

World War I. See First World War Wundt, Wilhelm: Flournoy, student of, 69; laboratory for experimental psychology and, 12, 139–40; muscular sense and, 115, 139–40; research interest of, 167; Ribot and, 149; Sievers and, 142, 151; stimulus-response schemata and,

Index

165; Stumpf, experimental psychology, and, 151–52 X-ray cinematography, 205, 208 Zimmermann, Eduard, 140 Zinn, Earl F., 50