Eolian Harp Research Articles

The Aeolian harp sound from the Madelung model of quantum mechanics

According to Madelung, Bohm and Vigier, Wilhelm, Rosen and others, the original Schroedinger equation can be transformed into the hydrodynamical system of equations by using the so called Madelung ansatz. We derive in such quantum hydrodynamics, the non-relativistic and relativistic Strouhal number from the so called von Karman's vortex street. The relativistic derivation of this formula follows from the addition formula for velocities. The Strouhal friction tones are generated also during the motion of cosmic rays in relic photon sea, during the motion of bolids in atmosphere, during the Saturn rings motion in the relic black-body sea, during the motion of bodies in superfluid helium and so on.

‘A Light in Sound, A Sound-Like Power in Light’: Coleridge’s Phenomenal Invisible

Abstract In a reading of ‘The Eolian Harp’ that draws briefly on ‘Frost at Midnight’, this article discusses Coleridge’s quest to do justice to the epiphanic potentialities of visual experience. In response to critical accounts of his metaphysics as imposed heavy-handedly upon reality, I reread Coleridge’s speculative reflections as both heuristic and responsive to something unequivocally real. Across these two poems, Coleridge transcribes his wonderstruck attunement to the visible world as replete with intimations of God. In doing so, the poet seeks a way of speaking about God that neither synonymises him with the world nor places him beyond the realm of phenomenal experience altogether.

La harpe éolienne mise en scène dans la poésie et le roman européens

La harpe éolienne, construite à partir du 17e siècle, est caractérisée par la singularité de ses sons qui déterminent ses emplois narratifs et poétiques. Devenue un topos important de la sentimentalité, du souvenir, de la mélancolie et de la mort, elle devient moyen de séduction chez Smollett, tonalité fondamentale de la nature pour le romantisme allemand, image de l’inspiration poétique pour un Coleridge.

STEAM project "The secret of the Aeolian Harp. In the footsteps of the Bernardazzi brothers"

The article discusses aspects of organizing extracurricular activities in informatics in secondary school using the STEAM approach. This approach is implemented through various forms of education and promising areas of digital technologies. One of the forms of education is the STEAM project — a system of interconnected blocks built on the basis of the principle of interdisciplinarity and aimed at solving the identifed problem. The article provides an example of the implemented interdisciplinary project aimed at developing in schoolchildren the ability to work with information, the ability to solve creative problems, and the formation and development of students' information culture. STEAM project "The secret of the Aeolian Harp. In the footsteps of the Bernardazzi brothers" is dedicated to the Year of Cultural Heritage of the Peoples of Russia, which was announced in Russia in 2022. During the STEAM project, schoolchildren solve problematic tasks and problematic situations with interdisciplinary content, practice-oriented tasks, and research tasks.

Howling winds and swinging sticks: An acoustical analysis

The phenomenon of the “howling wind” is very well known to many. It occurs as strong winds whip around bare tree branches and electrical transmission lines. This phenomenon has been known for a long time and was used to make music with the ancient Aeolian harp. We can create this sound in the lab by swinging sticks quickly through the air. A short characteristic “howl” is produced; the frequencies present depend upon the swinging speed and the diameter of the rod.

Coleridge’s Excursion into His Past in “Frost at Midnight”: Writing as Consolation for Memory

Samuel Coleridge Coleridge wrote several principal conversation poems such as “The Eolian Harp,” “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,” “Frost at Midnight,” and “The Nightingale.” “Frost at Midnight” is the linguistic product of his creative mind using memory to interact with the surrounding world. In the poem, his imaginative mind is never static but moves through memories to shape his identity and pursue his ideal self. The poem begins with the speaker in a state of meditation, having constant interaction with nature. To write a poem becomes an act of consolation, a communicative tool through which the poet manages to express his feelings toward the internal and external landscape. This essay aims to show how Coleridge’s writing—this conversation poem—plays an important role in consoling his childhood memory and creating his idealized self through self-reflection.

A Discipline of Submission: Taste and Tension in Allen Tate and Paul Ricoeur

A Discipline of Submission:Taste and Tension in Allen Tate and Paul Ricoeur Robert Vaughan There is nothing uniquely postmodern about wrestling with language's limitations, whether it is the poet or the critic doing the wrestling. Jacques Derrida admitted that "Speaking frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much," but such reservations long predated the theorists who came to prominence in the latter years of the twentieth century ("Force and Signification" 9). Samuel Taylor Coleridge had expressed similar doubts as the eighteenth came to a close. Though he may be remembered best for his belief in the secondary imagination's "esemplastic power" to render the divine intelligible for human consumption, he also conceded that words were only "shapings of the unregenerate mind; / Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break" ("Aeolian Harp" 27–28). He considered language "the sacred Fire in the Temple of Humanity" (Collected Letters III 522), but he knew that he could "not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within" ("Dejection" 115). What divides the romantic and the postmodern view is not so much a loss of faith in language's efficacy as it is a loss of faith in the nature of the reality language seeks to grasp. Is the poet a "carver," as Donald Davie posited, one who perceives "the form he wants . . . already present in the marble. . . . a reality which is . . . fully and undeniably out there" (111, 112)? Or has the "out there" really always been an "in there," as Jonathan Culler has said, "implicit knowledge that i myself have not brought to consciousness" (91)? whether "reality" is a realm of light glimmering down from the mouth of Plato's cave or only a solipsistic reflection of every writer's (and reader's) interior undiscovered country, what is certain is that it can only be charted linguistically, an expedition T. S. Eliot warned would be undertaken "[w]ith shabby [End Page 335] equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of imprecision of feeling" ("East Coker" 128). And if the poet acknowledges the limits of language, what is left for the critic? For more than half a century, literary theory's current has mostly flowed in an inescapable direction. The "imprecision of feeling" lamented by Eliot leaves us all in the same "general mess," demonstrating only that the bubbles' glitter does not find its source in any "sacred fire." Any "scriptor," said Barthes, simply accesses an "immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred" (147). If the poet strains to see something "beyond the picture" of his own reflection, as he does in Frost's "For Once, Then, Something," it is now the critic's task to demonstrate that what he thought he had glimpsed was not "[s]omething more of the depths," but only his own face "in the summer heaven godlike" (208). As Richard Rorty put it, The suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own. . . . The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that. (5, 6) The "demythologizing" of language and its power was birthed in the Enlightenment, and the romantics who followed that era memorably railed against many of its advances. "Once we lived in what we saw," wrote Emerson in "Experience"; "now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. . . . Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast" (487). "Disenchantment" is the term the sociologist Max Weber would eventually use to describe the shift: The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the...

The Romantic Concealment of Desire: Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s Poetic Voices


 
 
 
 The present study poses an interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” so as to evince the subject of desire as the ulterior motif of these texts, even though the poetic voices of these works attempt to conceal such a theme. This reading interprets both poems as compositions that share the same thematic line as William Blake’s “The Book of Thel” and John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Consequently, the close reading of the poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge will be presented.
 
 
 

Music Theory's Other Nature: Reflections on Gaia, Humans, and Music in the Anthropocene

The new historical paradigm ushered in by the Anthropocene offers a timely and urgent opportunity to rethink the relationship of humans and nature. Bruno Latour's take on the Gaia hypothesis, which rejects the traditional subject/object divide, shows how the human can be inscribed into the work of music theory. This turn toward Latour's Actor-Network Theory, which erases the categorical difference between human and nonhuman agents, now dressed up in cosmic garb under the banner of the Gaia hypothesis, appears to be distant from traditional music-theoretical concerns, but the connection is in fact less far-fetched than it seems. J. G. Kastner's music theory, taking its cue from the sound of the Aeolian harp, serves as a test case here: the Aeolian harp, played by wind directly, had long served as a Romantic image of the superhuman forces of nature, but Kastner argues that the Aeolian network only becomes complete in human ears. By unraveling the various instances and agencies of Kastner's theory, this article charts a novel approach to music and sound that sidesteps the conceptual problems in which the nineteenth-century mainstream habitually gets entangled. Kastner's work is based on a fundamental crisis in the conception of sound, after the invention of the mechanical siren (1819) tore down any certainties about the categorical distinction between noise and musical sound. Seeking to rebuild the understanding of sound from the ground up, Kastner leaves no stone unturned, from the obsolete Pythagorean tradition of musica mundana to travelers’ reports about curious sonic environmental phenomena from distant parts of the world. Where the old mechanistic paradigm was built on a “physical music” (and a static “sound of nature” based on the harmonic series), Kastner proposes a new “chemical music” that is based on the dynamic, ever-changing sonority of the Aeolian harp. This chemical music does not (yet) exist, but Kastner gives us some clues about its features, especially in his transcription/simulation of the sound of the Aeolian harp scored for double symphony orchestra. Kastner's “chemical music” finally closes the music-theoretical network that he builds around his new conception of the supernatural sound of the Aeolian harp and its human and nonhuman agents.

Beyond Sound in Sound Art: Society and Politics in the Art of Yasunao Tone and Akio Suzuki

The history of sound art has been a case of displacement and misplacement. It has been displaced due to the nature of the medium – sound, a phenomenon that is heard and felt but not seen. In a visually dominated world like ours, this spells the relegation of the importance of sound and audio sensitivity in a human’s perception, cognition and consciousness. It is misplaced as it is more often categorically subsumed under the other art form, music. Sound art is in fact one of the most ancient of art forms when the name of Greek god of wind, Aeolus, was used to name the Aeolian harp. Sound art has often been defined, in the late 20th century and early 21st century and by academics and critics, as a novel form of art. Once again it is another case of displacement and misplacement. The two case studies which will be discussed in this paper will foreground the social and political contexts of the artists as well as their responses to these socio-­political conditions to demonstrate that sound art, just like any other art forms like paintings, music and theatre, is reflexive of the times of the creators, and more.

How the sheng became a harp

ABSTRACT In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, a new family of free-reed keyboard instruments – including accordions, harmoniums, and parlour organs – became hugely popular throughout Europe. Although these instruments relied on a novel acoustical technology borrowed from an ancient Chinese mouth organ known in the West since the seventeenth century, instrument makers and music critics alike consistently described the sounds they produced using ideas native to a Romantic tradition of affective discourse around windblown strings and spiritual transcendence. This essay traces the European reception of free reeds and interrogates the conditions under which keyboard instruments based on a Chinese technology came to be heard as embodying the properties of a very different instrument: the Aeolian harp. Although various agendas collaborated in obscuring the East Asian origins of the free-reed technology, it seems highly probable that changing political and racial contexts – most notably around 1830 – directly affected the ways in which the reeds were both heard and understood. Studying the appropriation of free reeds by the West as well as the technology’s postcolonial afterlives, I argue, can help us better understand the conditions under which sound objects are assimilated or rejected in changing cultural settings.

Assuring the Antecedents of Pantheism and Metaphysical Speculation in Coleridge’s Poetic Work

This article is about the poetic work of Coleridge's pantheism and metaphysical speculations. As he is one of the most influential poets of the romantic period in the field of English literature. He considered the wonderfully imaginative, psychological, metaphysical and pantheistic romantic poems with comparing other greatest poets by a recognized location. There are number of aspects in Coleridge’s personality and also in his writings consists of philosophy, religion, metaphysical aspects, irony, imagination, metaphor, and pantheism. In this research article, the discussion is taken from his most impressive poems “The Ancient Mariner”, “The Eolian Harp”, “Religious Musings” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, which shows Coleridge’s representation of of terms Patheism and metaphysical spaculations. Coleridge gave two philosophical declarations. These two declarations are related to his concept of "one Life”. They are related to the different theories and symbolically different. The first declaration appears after Coleridge connotation with the breeze that has caressed the lute, the second declaration is about his previous experience where he had been little more than a passive lute being caresses by the breeze. Hence these two declarations come to know after a representation of imagination and after explaining of fancy in the period of Romantisicim.

The Eolian Harp: Coleridge’s Middle Voice?

Abstract Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s conversation poem, The Eolian Harp, configures a complex and highly significant relationship between activity and passivity. A merely passive poet, under the influence of natural or divine inspiration, would in Coleridge’s view be reduced to a mere automaton. Yet the poem is often thought to represent just such a poet. Similarly, it is thought to represent Sara, the speaker’s interlocutor, as a surrogate self. I shall argue, instead, that the poem presents the self in a ‘middle voice’, at once active and passive, such that inspiration does not efface human agency. I shall also consider the senses in which Sara evinces a middle voice and thus a distinct and substantial subjectivity. The implications of this argument for Coleridge’s broader corpus, and for some recent critiques of his aesthetics, will be suggested.

The Eolian Harp: Coleridge's Middle Voice?

The Eolian Harp: Coleridge's Middle Voice?

“Always the same unrememberable revelation”: Thoreau’s Telegraph Harp, the Development of an Immanent Romantic Secularism, and Golden Age Children’s Literature

Courtney A. Floyd, “‘Always the same unrememberable revelation’: Thoreau’s Telegraph Harp, the Development of an Immanent Romantic Secularism, and Golden Age Children’s Literature” (pp. 30–53) In this essay, I analyze Henry David Thoreau’s references to and use of the telegraph, Aeolian harp, and telegraph harp in his journals between the years 1851 and 1853, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), and Walden (1854). I argue that the figure of the telegraph harp, though only briefly mentioned in Thoreau’s published works, represents a significant reworking of Romantic sensibility into a modern, immanent, and secular narrative of mundane transcendence that undergirds his particular transcendentalism. Thoreau obfuscates the material modernity of the telegraph harp even as he rescripts its very materiality. His diction in passages about the telegraph harp implies a sort of transcendence but grounds that transcendence in the natural landscape and a physical symbol of modern technology, establishing a conceptual legacy that informs not only second-generation transcendentalism, but also and unexpectedly, Golden Age children’s literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper: The ‘Morning Post’ and the Road to ‘Dejection’ by Heidi Thomson

 Reviews covering a vast range of issues relating to textual variants, subtextual meanings, cultural legacies, and historical contexts. Pittock describes the Museum as a ‘monument to the musical and generic fusion culture of eighteenth-century Scotland’ (, ); this edition might equally be described as a monumental contribution to the study of Burns and Scottish music, whose influence will be felt for decades to come. U  L A B Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper: e ‘Morning Post’ and the Road to ‘Dejection ’. by H T. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. . xii+.£.. ISBN ––––. In the first few pages of Coleridge and the Romantic Newspaper, Heidi omson poses the question ‘why, you may well ask, another book inspired by “Dejection”?’ (p. ), which one might supplement by asking whether we need another book about Coleridge and Wordsworth and, more specifically, the protracted collapse of their friendship, founded largely in mutual disillusionment and played out with the publication of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads; her answer is simple: ‘because I wanted to find out more about Coleridge’s compulsive expression of what could be considered private matters’ (p. ). Accordingly, this book focuses on just a few years of Coleridge’s life—–—during his ‘intense involvement with the Morning Post’ as a way of ‘unlocking his personal and poetic interests’ in a study that is primarily biographical, but also ‘textual and contextual’ (p. ). e results are surprising and persuasive, and throughout her book, omson provides sustained and illuminated readings of largely neglected pieces, excavates Coleridge’s complex and ever shiing state of mind (in part produced by his infatuation or limerent devotion to Sara Hutchinson and his compromised feelings towards his wife, whom he admired as a mother but struggled to adore as a lover), and also exposes and explores his friendship with Mary Robinson. Biography and creativity are seen to be interwoven to the point of co-dependency—which is, perhaps, on the face of it, an obvious point to make; but the book unpicks and unpacks the intricacies of their self-involvement in a consistently compelling way. omson examines Coleridge’s ‘reluctant, painful realization’ that ‘neither Wordsworth nor Sara Hutchinson were as obsessed with Coleridge as he was with them’ and his ‘need to publicize it’ (p. ). She further reveals that ‘his ideas about poets and poetry were to a surprising degree associated with his frustrated expectations of domestic happiness’ (p. ). In assessing how he publicized these frustrations, she presents a Coleridge who always needed to have the last word. e second chapter (aer the Introduction) sets the scene for what follows, examines Coleridge’s return from Germany in July , discusses how ‘the two most important relationships’ in his life—his marriage to Sara Fricker and his friendship with Wordsworth—‘came to a watershed’ (pp. , ), and considers his love of the North (geography being an important theme in the book: Coleridge was always MLR, .,   concerned with his proximity to those who were in—or moving out of—his life). e third discusses Coleridge’s work at the Morning Post and devotes considerable space to a prolonged assessment of the largely neglected poem ‘Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie’ (later retitled ‘Love’), considering it in relation to ‘e Eolian Harp’, ‘To William Wordsworth’, and ‘Lewti’. e fourth considers Coleridge’s ‘Ode to Georgiana’ (the Duchess of Devonshire) and his fascinating essay on Pitt, which reveals much of Coleridge’s talent for astute insight. Aer this Coleridge leaves London and heads north to Greta Hall. omson traces the origin of the depression that would be immortalized in ‘Dejection’ from this period, combining newspaper pieces with letters and notebook entries to build up a full picture of his mental and emotional state. e next two chapters focus on Coleridge’s surprisingly close relationship to Mary Robinson and how it complicated the Coleridge/Wordsworth paradigm. e penultimate chapter contextualizes ‘Dejection’ in relation to ‘lesser known poems and texts which were published at about the same time in the Morning Post’ (p. ). e conclusion concentrates on the differences between the April and October versions of ‘Dejection’, and claims that ‘the poem that Coleridge published in the Morning Post is just as much both...

Thinking Thinking Literature Across Continents Across Generations

Thinking <i>Thinking Literature Across Continents</i> Across Generations

Poe and the Idea of Music: Failure, Transcendence, and Dark Romanticism

Poe and the Idea of Music: Failure, Transcendence, and Dark Romanticism

Science and Poetry in 1790s Somerset: The Self-Experiment Narrative, the Aeriform Effusion, and the Greater Romantic Lyric

This article reads the so-called Greater Romantic lyric, or conversation poem, in the context of a culture of enquiry in 1790s Bristol. In this culture, I argue, poems and scientific experiments were complementary ways of exploring the mind/body/nature relationship--experiment narratives concerning the inhalation of newly-isolated gases, or airs. "The Aeolian Harp," "Frost at Midnight," "Kubla Khan," and "Tintern Abbey" were interventions in scientific, social, and political debate rather than idealizing escapes from it. Vital to their interventions was their pneumaticism, their effusive form and textualization of speech--means of registering the restoration of the social self to a healthy state.

Music and sound of the 17th Century: Athanasius Kircher and his Phonosophia anacamptica

In the 17th Century many Physicists, Mathematicians and Musicians dealt with the experiences of harmony, music, and sound propagation in enclosed interior spaces. Among them, Athanasius Kircher was one of the most influential researchers of his time. Born in Geisa, Thüringia (Germany), he became a Jesuit in 1608 and spent a large part of his life in Rome, where he died in 1680. During his lifetime, he wrote several books spanning a wide range of topics, including sound, music, and acoustics. One of these, the Phonurgia Nova, published in 1673, was almost ignored for hundreds of years. Phonurgia Nova was translated from the original Latin. It consists of two different books, the Phonosophia nova and the Phonosophia anacamptica. The former deals with the influence of music on human beings whereas the latter analyses sound propagation in enclosed spaces. In this paper, the Authors present new achievements regarding some of the apparatuses that Kircher invented. Among all his marvelous sound machines, the Authors will describe some of Kircher’s items, including the tuba stentorophonica (the “loud trumpet”), the statua citofonica (the “talking statue”), the obiectum phonocampticum (the “phonocentric object”), the Ruota Cembalaria (the “sounding wheel”), the ancient Egyptian singing statue of Memnon, the Aeolian Harp, and the hydraulis (hydraulic organ). Some of these apparatuses were also recently partially realized by the Polish Pavilion during the Biennale of Venice in 2012, achieving a Special Mention from the international jury.