Review: The Psychophysical Ear: Music Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 by Alexandra Hui; Helmholtz and the Modern Listener by Benjamin Steege

Abstract

The Psychophysical Ear: Music Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 , by Alexandra Hui. Transformations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. xxii, 233 pp. Helmholtz and the Modern Listener , by Benjamin Steege. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xii, 282 pp. Let us imagine an aesthetics of music grounded in the notion of compression . Audio file-compression locates the point at which the granularity of the signal is of sufficient density to recreate sound, to give the illusion of an original indistinguishable from that of a higher-resolution reproduction. We might stipulate that the efficiency of perception is an aesthetic desideratum: the beautiful or well-formed is that which transmits musical information without waste, locates a “sweet spot” in the density of information. The flattened dynamics of commercial music could be said to be well formed, locating the ideal point in the dynamic range or the place of maximum efficiency. Should we be catholic in our definition of music, we could assert that the clarity of the cinematic soundscape (wherein everything is completely audible) is likewise efficient or ideal. From this a corollary: sound designed or rendered is to be preferred to “natural” sound. By extension, we might imagine a sociology, one wherein the beautiful is that which is coded by timbre or genre or the like so as to allow internal soundscapes to be optimized ; or to allow even for an optimized listening, one locating an ideal point between attention and disattention. What is interesting here is not the exercise itself (admittedly facile) but the almost automatic rejoinders it provokes. Rejoinders epistemological: Would not neuroscience, perhaps, provide a more solid ground for an aesthetics, one whose development rested less on suggestion and more on things empirical, testable? Rejoinders moral: Would not an aesthetics grounded in efficiency sacrifice a richness of experience? Is there not something important captured by lossless encoding, or vinyl? Rejoinders ethical or disciplinary: Given that the desideratum of such a theory would be a set of covering laws governing music, could the end result be anything but mechanistic, …