Abstract
Is aesthetic philosophy in any way commensurable with scientific methods? How does aesthetic philosophy influence scientific research programmes? In The Psychophysical Ear, Alexandra Hui sets out to recount the foundational role that musical aesthetics played in the research programmes of the scientists who developed the emerging fields of psychophysics and experimental psychology in mid- to late 19th-century Germany and Austria.
Despite the increasing disciplinary specialization of scientific work during the 19th century, the study of sound sensation, argues Hui, became increasingly intertwined with musical culture and aesthetics. Those doing foundational work in psychophysics – that is, the study of the relationship between the physical world and its psychical counterpart – were also versed in the musical aesthetics of the day as trained musicians and through personal associations with prominent musicians. The questions surrounding them in the aesthetic milieu of the time motivated their scientific questions and influenced how they asked them. To understand the psychophysics of the 19th century and the formative years of its now-burgeoning instantiation as experimental psychology, one must understand the role aesthetics played. That is the relationship which The Psychophysical Ear explores.
As Hui recounts, several aesthetic tensions permeated the musical discourses of the time. If the form and content of music were inseparable, as A. B. Marx argued, and audiences could learn the practice of Hanslick’s ‘aesthetic listening’ to properly appreciate such forms, how could it also be true that music from different times and places could all achieve beauty? Was beauty historicist in nature, or universal and unchanging? With arguments over new tuning systems and an increasing awareness of musics foreign to these musicians, how could these aesthetic positions continue to be justified? Also, given that different listeners could hear out different aspects of the same performance, how could the subjectivity of different listeners be admitted if there was a correct way to listen? How could one change what one heard at all?
The psychophysicists set out to describe and explain these tensions with science. They searched for ways to describe the relationship between the physical world and the psychical one in order to hang their aesthetic theories on the steadfast yet elusive foundation of the ‘natural.’ Hui reviews these tensions and the prominent music theorists, philosophers, and scientists who engaged with them. She opens with a discussion of Fechner and his experimental aesthetics ‘from below’ (von Unten) which aimed to link higher judgments of beauty to the physical nature of the world. Through A. B. Marx, Eduard Hanslick, and Hugo Riemann, she highlights the tensions between the authority of the trained listener’s subjective judgments with physical measurements of the objective reality of sound. Through the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, Hui shows how aesthetics were manifested materially in the construction and tuning of musical instruments that in turn shaped the sound worlds in which scientists like Helmholtz performed experiments and engaged with aesthetic discourses. The work of Ernst Mach and Eduard Kulke sought to explain the ability to attend to different aspects of the same music by examining the physiology of the ear. Given that many of the research programmes of these scientists eventually resorted to historicist explanations of perception, Hui concludes with a discussion of the Stumpf-Wundt debates about the role of musical expertise in perceptual experiments, foreshadowing a more modern separation between psychophysics and aesthetics as well as the emergence of ethnomusicology. A brief ‘coda’ traces music–psychological and experimental–aesthetic questions to the present day.
Through examining the philosophies and music theories of these figures and others, Hui argues that these psychophysical questions were also intertwined with aesthetic ones. The philosophical intersections between aesthetics and the scientific method that were characteristic of the research at that time are problematic to this day, and so the historical narrative which traces such tensions to the early development of the field provides a valuable perspective for today’s music psychologists.
Sometimes this connection to the present day is difficult to make, however. For instance, Hui claims in the coda chapter that modern neuroscientific research on music is not in fact the ‘true legacy,’ in her terminology, of 19th-century psychophysical research programmes because while these modern research programmes ‘can have implications for aesthetics’ they ‘are not . . . framed from the start as combined studies of aesthetics and sensory perception. They are studies of neurons that may provide insight into aesthetics’ (p. 153). Granted that we are more likely today to claim to make a distinction between the processes of perception and the aesthetic value of the thing-perceived, one could argue that aesthetics is still intertwined with modern music psychology – at least by using the reasoning that Hui uses to analyze 19th-century music psychology. Modern psychologists in general, including music psychologists, like the musicologists in Hui’s history, are also increasingly aware of and challenged by the importance of studying perception from different cultures around the world (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Music psychological research today also needs to operationalize definitions of music, which requires using particular conceptions of what counts as music in order to use music as stimuli for experiments. The very questions that modern music psychologists ask are at least partially circumscribed by aesthetic assumptions about what music is and what its value is to society (particularly when considering research funding). Granted, today we can make a distinction between psychoacoustics and music psychology – the former may not be aesthetic in character while the latter still holds some important links. Even given this, however, it is unclear how such a thesis about aesthetics being intertwined with scientific methods could be wrong – at least not without questioning the complex philosophical relationship between them.
This raises my only substantial criticism of the book. The nature of the philosophical relationship between the aesthetics of the day and psychophysics is never entirely clear. Is aesthetics considered here as a way of assessing the value of music? Does it refer to the more general philosophical use of the term as a description of perception? There are many examples in the text of the influence of aesthetics on the questions that these psychophysicists tried to answer with scientific methods, but in what ways was 19th-century research exceptional in this regard? Did it have a special kind of relationship that scientific research from other times and places did not have? To be sure, the book is helpful in exploring various specific cases of aesthetic influence – this is convincing – but the main thesis is sometimes less compelling not because it is not supported, but because it is not refutable, at least in its presentation here. To be fair, the book is primarily historical in motivation; it may not be accountable to offer an analysis of this philosophical relationship. However, it is a history of science and a history of aesthetics, so it seems justified to call for a stronger philosophical grounding in order for the author to be able to make her point about the nature of their relationship.
For example, in some of Hui’s examples, instructively, the scientific research did not match the aesthetic background and may have worked to alter it. For instance, when Riemann claimed to hear undertones but found no physical evidence of such a phenomenon, the aesthetic principle of the authority of the subjective perspective came into conflict with the purported objectivity of the scientific method. Similarly, Mach’s descriptions of the accommodation mechanism of the ear could be linked to the need for an explanation for how different people could hear out different aspects of music, but Mach ultimately did not succeed in describing this ability as a physiological mechanism. These researchers eventually turned to historicist explanations of perception. They may have been motivated by current aesthetic philosophies, but the conclusions themselves were not only aesthetic in character. They challenged contemporary aesthetics, and produced knowledge that was not only aesthetic, but physical and physiological in character. Would we then say that the research programme was still intertwined with aesthetics? Was it in parallel? Or divergent?
Although the book is presented to be about the psychophysics of sound, a more thorough exploration or comparison with the concurrent psychophysics of optics (including important work by Helmholtz whose acoustic work is prominently featured in the text) could help clarify what philosophical influence aesthetics had on theories of the emerging psychophysics. How did aesthetics influence work on vision? Was the intersection between aesthetics and these new scientific methods limited to the study of sound sensation? Or could all psychophysical study be said to be circumscribed by contemporary aesthetics? It could be argued that due to the nature of the thesis, the book should not be confined to only the aural sense. An expansion into other psychophysical work at the time could help support and clarify Hui’s thesis.
Perhaps this criticism is merely the result of being provoked by the epistemological milieu that Hui recounts. She provides a strong understanding of the role of music in motivating these psychophysical researchers and in the early organization of the field. She reaffirms the importance of considering aesthetic influences on scientific research programmes and convincingly locates them as central in this portrayal, even if the nature of the philosophical relationship is left for a separate discussion.
The psychological sciences today are meeting resistance as they increase the scope of the behaviours they seek to describe and explain. Today music psychologists confront similar questions: Can music from around the world be explained in similar cognitive-scientific terms? How is listening an active process (Cross, 2010)? From the point of view of a modern music psychologist, Hui’s account is a reminder of the historical relationship between aesthetics and science and a motivation to continue to consider its modern relationship. A music psychologist wishing to solidify their understanding of early music psychology and trace the lineage of the tensions between scientific and aesthetic explanations of music should read The Psychophysical Ear.