Von Helmholtz Research Articles

History as a Tool for Natural Science

Historical methods have long been put to use in the making of natural knowledge. In this article, I examine the use of historical methods by nineteenth-century physicists, focusing on the Austrian researcher Ernst Mach in particular. I argue that Mach applied methods characteristic of the then-dominant historical and philological disciplines to his own discipline of physics. He construed history as a tool for the physicist. On the basis of a study of his notebooks and correspondence with the chemist-turned-historian Emil Wohlwill, I explain what he sought to achieve by means of this tool, and reconstruct the practices characterizing his historical research. These practices included the reading, ordering, and comparison of textual sources. Moreover, Mach appropriated the historical-philological method of source criticism. I show that prominent fellow physicists of Mach, including Johann Poggendorff and Hermann von Helmholtz, made use of similar historical methods, even though their aims were different. Together, the cases of these history-writing physicists illustrate how history and natural science continued to intertwine in a time of increasing disciplinary fragmentation.

Zur Suche nach Logik und Bedeutung von Musik. Geschichte und Gegenwart von Interdisziplinarität im Bereich musiktheoretischer Forschung

This essay reviews the impact of (music) psychology on music theory from the late 19th century until the present. From the beginning, music psychology’s focus on musical listening has been the main reason for this impact. The changes in Hugo Riemann’s theory from physical explanations (especially for major-minor-polarity), derived, amongst others, from Hermann von Helmholtz’ research, to a phenomenological model has been deeply influenced by the “Tonpsychologie” of Carl Stumpf who, in turn, can be termed one of the founders of gestalt theory. For Riemann, the idea that “facts of consciousness” had priority over physical conditions gained paramount importance. In particular, it seemed to explain the impression of consonance as release and dissonance as striving force more feasibly than ratios of oscillation speeds. Ernst Kurth took up this idea. His work relies on the gestalt experience, more specifically on the experience of energetic force, another foundation derived from Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Kurth’s music theory introduced a novel spatial, dynamic principle of form. Although Robert Hatten’s idea of an “energetic shaping through time” and his theory of gestures reference Kurth’s ideas, the linguistic roots of his “topic”-oriented concept betray substantial differences to Kurth’s process-based idea of musical form. Fred Lerdahl’s and Ray Jackendoff’s Generative Theory of Tonal Music connects to gestalt theoretical principles, linked, however, as only in early gestalt theory, to the idea of perceptual universals, presupposing that gestalt formations (e. g., the grouping of durations) are processed “automatically”. More recent gestalt theory has replaced this universalist idea by a stronger focus on learning. Subsequent theories of musical cognition retain the gestalt term as a prominent model. The focus of research, however, is usually not derived from questions about the cognition of musical structure alone, but guided by the intention to formalize cognition models with the help of computer programming languages, often without properly reflecting the modes of thinking and listening that such models presuppose.

Konsonanzempfinden und Periodizitätsanalyse im auditorischen System

Since ancient times, regular pulses of the air beating against the ear have been regarded as the cause of pitch. Until the time of Leonhard Euler, theorists plotted point sequences to represent these regular pulses of the air. Two parallel point sequences symbolized an interval. The number of coinciding points of both point sequences determined the degree of consonance or dissonance. This so called “coincidence theory of consonance” lost its importance with the rise of modern science. Georg Simon Ohm introduced Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier’s theorem to acoustics which allowed precise spectral analysis and calculation of any vibration. A tone was no longer described by a sequence of points symbolizing pulses of the air but by sine or cosine functions and their sums. Spectral analysis led to considerations in the frequency-domain. Combining it with the phenomenon of roughness, Hermann von Helmholtz developed a consonance theory based on the disturbance of harmony by roughness. Today, his idea forms the basis of the concept of sensory consonance. In contrast to computations in the frequency domain, however, sound is neuronally processed in the time domain. A single tone, for example, is neuronally represented by a periodic pulse train. Musical intervals produce firing patterns in the auditory nerve with regularities depending on the vibration ratio of the fundamental pitches. A mathematical model can be described that makes it possible to define a value to calculate the degree of these regularities for each vibration ratio. It turns out that this value, called Generalized coincidence function (Allgemeine Koinzidenzfunktion) is quite similar to the degree of tonal fusion as described by Carl Stumpf. This finding makes it probable that tonal fusion is a consequence of certain properties of the neuronal periodicity detection mechanism. Together with the roughness of intervals, this neuronal mechanism may be regarded as the basis of consonance and dissonance.

Interdisciplinarity and Metaphors. Historical Reflections on Music Theory and the Psychology of Music

Music theory and the psychology of music have maintained a close relationship, especially since the 1980s. Yet, the liaison between these two fields can be further traced back to the late 19th century, the formative period of both modern musicology and psychology. This article deals with those interdisciplinary works of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which we may refer to as early music psychology marked by the writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, Carl Stumpf, Hugo Riemann and Ernst Kurth. Instead of tracing the historical origins of current studies, however, this article attempts to contextualize the discourse of early music psychology and identify how these theories were constructed. The linguistic and metaphorical formations that appear frequently in early music psychological writings are examined – in particular the metaphors related to the notion of musical force, most of which were imported from the contemporary sciences such as physics and physiology. An examination of the “source domains” of metaphors such as »life-force«, »living force« and a group of terms related to physical forces reveals different conceptions of the ways in which the boundaries between the natural and mental sciences may be crossed and of different notions of listening to music. To borrow Morris Berman’s expressions, we may observe here a shift from “disenchanted” to “re-enchanted” music psychology. It is often said that the subject matter of psychology (i. e., the human mind) is constructed by practising psychologists themselves, and that changes in psychological language signify psychological change in their own right. The same holds true for the psychology of music. How do we conceptualize music? How does this conception shape the field of music psychology? By evoking such questions, historical and critical reflections on early music psychology may serve to rethink present-day interdisciplinary works between music theory and music psychology.

Social Scientists

Social Scientists

The Certainty of Ambiguity in Visual Neural Representations.

Some images evoke bistable percepts: two different visual experiences seen in alternation while continuously viewing an unchanged stimulus. The Necker Cube and Rubin's Vase are classic examples, each of which gives alternating percepts of different shapes. Other bistable percepts are alternating colors or directions of motion. Although stimuli that result in salient bistability are rare and sometimes cleverly constructed to emphasize ambiguity, they have been influential for over 150 years, since the work of von Helmholtz, who considered them to be evidence for perceptual visual processes that interpret retinal stimuli. While bistability in natural viewing is uncommon, the main point of this review is that implicit ambiguity in visual neural representations is pervasive. Resolving ambiguity, therefore, is a fundamental and ubiquitous process of vision that routinely affects what we see, not an oddity arising from cleverly crafted images. This review focuses on the causes of widespread ambiguity, historical perspectives on it, and modern knowledge and theory about resolving it.

Bernhard Riemann, the Ear, and an Atom of Consciousness

Why did Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866), arguably the most original mathematician of his generation, spend the last year of life investigating the mechanism of hearing? Fighting tuberculosis and the hostility of eminent scientists such as Hermann Helmholtz, he appeared to forsake mathematics to prosecute a case close to his heart. Only sketchy pages from his last paper remain, but here we assemble some significant clues and triangulate from them to build a broad picture of what he might have been driving at. Our interpretation is that Riemann was a committed idealist and from this philosophical standpoint saw that the scientific enterprise was lame without the “poetry of hypothesis”. He believed that human thought was fundamentally the dynamics of “mind-masses” and that the human mind interpenetrated, and became part of, the microscopic physical domain of the cochlea. Therefore, a full description of hearing must necessarily include the perceptual dimensions of what he saw as a single manifold. The manifold contains all the psychophysical aspects of hearing, including the logarithmic transformations that arise from Fechner’s law, faithfully preserving all the subtle perceptual qualities of sound. For Riemann, hearing was a unitary physical and mental event, and parallels with modern ideas about consciousness and quantum biology are made. A unifying quantum mechanical model for an atom of consciousness—drawing on Riemann’s mind-masses and the similar “psychons” proposed by Eccles—is put forward.

Helmholtz at 200.

Hermann von Helmholtz was born 200 years ago, but his influence on vision research is enduring. His legacy in vision is celebrated visually with anaglyphs that combine portraits of him with illustrations from his publications. Emphasis is directed principally to his Treatise on Physiological Optics. Among the optical instruments Helmholtz invented were the ophthalmoscope, ophthalmometer, and telestereoscope. Mention is made of his investigations into accommodation, colour vision, eye movements, stereoscopic vision, binocular rivalry, and lustre. Helmholtz also presented his analyses of vision and art in several of his Popular Lectures.

The vision of Helmholtz

ABSTRACT Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821–1894) began investigating vision at a time when its study was undergoing a revolution. Laboratory experiments were augmenting the long history of naturalistic observations. Instruments of stimulus control enabled the manipulation of time and space in ways that had not been possible previously, and Helmholtz added to their tally. Vision was a central issue in his early years as an academic, and the bicentenary of his birth is here celebrated visually. Much of his research on vision was described in his Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, which was translated into English to mark the centenary of his birth. The history of his Handbuch is examined, together with illustrating highlights from it. Helmholtz’s contributions to understanding the eye as an optical instrument, the sensations of vision, and perception were expressed in the three parts of the Handbuch, which became the three volumes of his Treatise on Physiological Optics.

TACHYCARDIA MISDIAGNOSED AS PSYCHOTIC MENTAL ILLNESS.

Many people with similar or related life challenges may decide not to share personal information of the kind described in the present memoir. My sharing is intended in defense of my cognitive salience: despite having been diagnosed as supposedly “psychotic.” It is my hope that this memoir might help tip the scales in favor of “psycho-social” rather than “in-your-head,” models of personality disorder (1, 2, 3). Superior psychological models can be found (4); even before the gross statistics of Charles Spearman (1863 to 1945), AND before the forced conditioning experimentations of Ivan Pavlov (1849 to 1936), AND as well before the dubious Oral-Anal Hypothesis of Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939). Some of these models (4) were presented by names such as Francis Galton (1822 to 1911), Hermann von Helmholtz (1821 to 1894), and Wilhelm Wundt (1832 to 1920): leaders of the subject area-domains commonly referred to as Experimental Psychology and Sensory Physiology.

HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ, EWALD HERING AND COLOR VISION: A CONTROVERSY OVER STYLES OF REASONING?

During the second half of the 19th century, in the field of physiological optics, there was a strong controversy between Hermann von Helmholtz and Ewald Hering. This controversy has been usually characterized as “empiricism” vs. “nativism”. In the field of physiology of visual perception, several subjects demanded attention, among them, color vision. Helmholtz and Hering suggested different theories for the physiological correlate of color sensation and different color spaces to give an account of the relationships between colors. In this article, I will argue that the controversy between the two authors could be understood as differences between styles of reasoning, and these different styles express different presuppositions. More specifically, I want to suggest that the disagreements could be linked to the discussions on how vital phenomena should be studied.

Hermann von Helmholtz and the aesthetics of the acoustics

Objective The aim of this study was to honour the 100-year birth jubilee of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), and his studies on the ‘aesthetics of acoustic’. Methods We will present original documents and historical references. Results After a brief section of biographical notes on von Helmholtz, we present the results of his acoustic studies and the analysis of his work ‘On the sensation of tone’. Conclusion von Helmholtz devoted part of his researches to acoustics, also creating new tools of his invention as his eponymy named resonators.

Computational phonogram archiving

A general approach to analyzing audio files makes it possible to re-create the sound of ancient instruments, identify cross-cultural musical properties, and more.

Die Entwicklung der Audiologie - von Helmholtz bis heute

On occasion of the 200th anniversary of the birthday of Hermann von Helmholtz the article presents a historical review on the development of audiology over the past two centuries. Modern audiology is considered to be a multidisciplinary field addressing clinical work and research on all aspects of hearing impairment, particularly prevention/protection, diagnostics and treatment of hearing problems as well as rehabilitation of patients with any degree of hearing loss. To cover all these subjects comprehensively would go beyond the scope of a journal article. Therefore, the review focuses on two of these domains, namely hearing research and diagnostic procedures as representatives for the other areas of audiology being equally important. The paper concludes with a brief look into the development of the organizational structures of audiology and a summary.

‘False Relations’: Hermann von Helmholtz's Study of Music and the Delineation of Nineteenth-Century Physiology

This article discusses the delineation between physiology and music theory in Hermann von Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1863). It takes the phenomenon of ‘false relations’ as a point of departure to question the methodology Helmholtz devised to study music and hearing. The key to understanding this experimental method is the concept of ‘controlled deviation’, which is substantiated in two main sections. After providing some background information on the history of music theory, the first section explores ‘false relations’ within the context of physiological experimentation and hydrodynamics, the two most important areas of Helmholtz's scientific research. The second section of the article is centred on the experimental methods of Helmholtz as used in his investigation of vision and hearing. More specifically, it introduces notions of distortion, defamiliarization and deviation to distinguish levels of physiology that relate to the body and to cognition. As it turns out, music posed specific problems for the researcher. Beyond the ephemerality of sound, the malleability of hearing and of musical aesthetics proved even more of an obstacle for controlled experimentation. The article concludes with a discussion of Hugo Riemann, who continued to explore the central finding of Helmholtz, namely that the rules of music change due to the habits of the listener.

The Unmusical Ear: Georg Simon Ohm and the Mathematical Analysis of Sound

AbstractThis essay presents a detailed analysis of Georg Simon Ohm’s acoustical research between 1839 and 1844. Because of its importance in Hermann von Helmholtz’s subsequent study of sound and he...

V1 neurons encode the perceptual compensation of false torsion arising from Listing’s law

We try to deploy the retinal fovea to optimally scrutinize an object of interest by directing our eyes to it. The horizontal and vertical components of eye positions acquired by goal-directed saccades are determined by the object's location. However, the eccentric eye positions also involve a torsional component, which according to Donder's law is fully determined by the two-dimensional (2D) eye position acquired. According to von Helmholtz, knowledge of the amount of torsion provided by Listing's law, an extension of Donder's law, alleviates the perceptual interpretation of the image tilt that changes with 2D eye position, a view supported by psychophysical experiments he pioneered. We address the question of where and how Listing's law is implemented in the visual system and we show that neurons in monkey area V1 use knowledge of eye torsion to compensate the image tilt associated with specific eye positions as set by Listing's law.

“Physiological Kantianism” and the “organization of the mind”: a reconsideration

ABSTRACT In this paper, I reconsider the notion of “physiological Kantianism”, applied to Hermann von Helmholtz, Friedrich Lange and other philosophers and scientists of the late nineteenth century. From Hermann Cohen to contemporary scholarship, this designation has been usually referred to a mistaken “naturalization” of Kant’s original theory of knowledge in terms of organic structures and dispositions. I argue that, on the contrary, although Helmholtz and Lange indeed endorsed a kind of biological innatism, thus modifying to some extent Kant’s original perspective, their views of the physiology of mental processes coexisted with the recognition of the irreducibility of a priori forms and principles to concepts and laws of physiology. I show that this coexistence of transcendental philosophy and physiology was an elaboration that can be traced back to a neglected late essay by Kant himself and hence should be understood as a genuine element of Kant’s legacy.

P1846HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ITS APPLICATION IN NEPHROLOGY

Abstract Background and Aims The application of artificial intelligence and neural networks in medicine is used to help solve problems that cannot be handled by the classical approach. The common name “cybernetics” encompassed the fields of management, information technology and biomedicine, but these disciplines continued to evolve independently due to the explosion of new knowledge. Over time, the development of neural networks has been turbulent and is now widely used in various fields of medicine and even in nephrology. The aim of the paper is to analyze the history of the development of artificial intelligence and its application in nephrology. Method Data were collected from books, magazines, encyclopedias and databases. Results Basic research on cybernetics and medicine was done by Golgi and Kelley doctors after Isaak Newton and Hermann von Helmholtz. The first theoretical mathematical models were derived in 1943 by Warren Mc Culloch and Walter Pitts. A few years later, a more contemporary contribution to the development of neural networks was given by Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann because they thought that research into biomedicine based on human brain function would be very interesting. In addition, in 1948 Norbert Wiener was the first to publish a work explaining the term cybernetics. At that time, the first experiments were made and new theories in the field of artificial intelligence were put forward by Marvin Misnki. The first training of neurons and the basis of all methods for training neurons was described by the Canadian Donald O Hebb. After the first successful neurocomputer in 1957, on which Rosenblatt worked, scientists have perfected various models of neural networks to this day. So far, mostly retrospective studies have been done in clinical nephrology, transplantation and dialysis with the help of algorithms used in neural networks. Particularly complex nephrologic patient relationships as well as assistance with timely implementation of new good clinical practice guidelines, patient prediction in at least the next month, and patient selection for palliative care are just some segments in nephrology that require the introduction of such tools into daily clinical practice with the aim of sensitive patient populations have better treatment outcomes, with physicians having more comprehensive insight and control over the mass of data. Conclusion Today‘s application of artificial intelligence in nephrology is based on retrospective research. The dizzying rise in technological development so far will allow the use of cybernetics and available tools based on neural network algorithms to enable and improve the nephrologists’ dedication and effectiveness.

Musical pitch quantization as an eigenvalue problem

How can discrete pitches and chords emerge from the continuum of sound? Using a quantum cognition model of tonal music, we prove that the associated Schrödinger equation in Fourier space is invariant under continuous pitch transpositions. However, this symmetry is broken in the case of transpositions of chords, entailing a discrete cyclic group as transposition symmetry. Our research relates quantum mechanics with music and is consistent with music theory and seminal insights by Hermann von Helmholtz.