Alexandra E. Hui

Changeable ears : Ernst Mach’s and Max Planck’s studies of accommodation in hearing

This article offers an examination of the psychophysical studies of accommodation in hearing by Ernst Mach and Max Planck, natural scientists better known for their accomplishments in physics and philosophy. Early in his career, Mach sought to experimentally locate the possible mechanism of accommodation in hearing, the phenomenon in which individuals can alter their experience of sound by changing their attention. Planck, employing a microtonal harmonium, studied the role of attention in vocalists’ abilities to hear tempered intervals—what he termed accommodation in hearing. Both mobilized music as a means of argument and experiment. This article shows how each physicist’s conception of accommodation in hearing drew on music and, in turn, informed his ideas about the historicity of hearing, the universality of the nineteenth-century Western musical aesthetic, and the nature of knowledge itself.

Origin Stories of Listening, Melody and Survival at the End of the Nineteenth Century

The standard narrative of the capital cities of the fin de siecle presents a cultural and political anxiety rapidly nearing a flash point. The art and the music, cultural historians say, reflect crises of identity that resulted in either a retreat to the past, into the mind or an all-out attack on tradition.4 Politics similarly struggled with an identity crisis of sorts as the expanding franchise of liberal democracy gave voice to radical groups on both the right and the left. We are told, perhaps a bit whiggishly, that this pervasive political anxiety and impotence of the European powers set the stage for the eventual explosions of violence in the first half of the twentieth century.