James Q. Davies and Ellen Lockhart’s essay collection Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789–1851 represents a crucial contribution to the growing body of work on sound in nineteenth-century England. While studies like Jonathan Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes, Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past (2003), and Benjamin Steege’s Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (2012) have highlighted the proliferation of acoustical science and sound technology in the Victorian period and early-twentieth century, Sound Knowledge takes us back to earlier discoveries about music and science and demonstrates the ways in which the two disciplines intersected at the dawn of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹

Bookended by Emily Dolan’s discussion of Charles Burney’s cataloguing of European musical instruments during his Continental travels and Flora Wilson’s examination of music at the Great Exhibition of 1851, Sound Knowledge traces the emergence of a distinct ‘aural culture’ in the early-nineteenth century, a time in which London was populated by ‘sites at once musical and scientific’ (p. 3). According to Davies and Lockhart, music was crucial to the programmes at the many newly opened scientific venues such as the Royal Institution, Statistical Society of London, Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and Exeter Hall, which housed musical lectures, recitals and festivals as well as scientific courses (pp. 16–17). While the essays in Davies and Lockhart’s collection are not the first to, as they write, ‘rebalance the voluminous academic literature on visual culture’ (p. 3) or challenge narratives of ‘Das Land ohne Musik’ (p. 24) – numerous sound studies theorists, musicologists and literary critics have recently done so – they do call our attention to a time before stark divisions between the arts and the sciences took hold and ‘disciplinary formations’ solidified (p. 12).Footnote ²

The essays in Sound Knowledge point to disruptions of the music–science divide that took hold later in the Victorian period. Dolan and Wilson both discuss instances in which scientific approaches were applied to musical study. Dolan investigates how Charles Burney’s General History of Music (1789) emerged out of Burney’s scientific approach to studying musical instruments on the Continent; he treated music like ‘an object of natural history’ and a ‘classifiable object’ (pp. 42–3). Through careful observation, collection and classification, Burney discovered different ‘species’ of instruments and wrote about the cultures in which he found them; in short, Dolan argues, Burney made music an ‘object of knowledge’ (p. 41). Wilson’s essay takes us half a century later to the Great Exhibition of 1851, where musical instruments were similarly organized into taxonomic classifications – treated as ‘industrial objects’ that were ordered and distributed throughout the Crystal Palace (pp. 232–5). Together, Dolan’s and Wilson’s essays showcase moments in which music shifted from the strictly aesthetic to the scientific realm.

While Dolan and Wilson demonstrate how scientific approaches aided the study of music, Deirdre Loughridge and Ellen Lockhart foreground how music enhanced public scientific demonstrations. Loughridge examines Adam Walker’s use of musical instruments to communicate Newtonian and astronomical science to the British public. In his lectures in London, Scotland and Ireland, Walker used his eidouranion, a large solar system model, as well as his celestina, a harpsichord fitted with a tool for bowing strings, to demonstrate the movements of the solar system. According to Loughridge, Walker’s highly theatrical demonstrations ‘connected astronomy and music in concrete ways’ (p. 47). Similarly, Lockhart analyses the composer and castrato singer Nicola Sampieri’s ‘audiovisual’ concerts – which used both music and images in the form of paintings, lanterns and flames – to illustrate principles of astronomy and patterns of seasonal change (p. 87).

Melissa Dickson and Myles Jackson both examine how musical invention translated into acoustical discovery for the scientist and inventor Charles Wheatstone. Dickson discusses Wheatstone’s invention of the acoucryptophone, or ‘enchanted lyre’, a device that emitted sound ‘without apparent human involvement’ by using a sounding box that was suspended by wires from the ceiling and connected to instruments in the room above (pp. 125–6). According to Dickson, the ‘enchanted lyre’ not only offered a form of spectacle and wonder, but also demonstrated principles of sound vibration, as the harpsichord emitted music when vibrations from the instruments above travelled through the wires (p. 126). The acoucryptophone helped communicate to audiences ‘the newly material nature of sound’ (p. 128). Jackson traces Wheatstone’s development of a ‘musical museum’, which contained instruments and mechanical devices that influenced his later studies of sound propagation, transmission, and technology (p. 106). Ideas borne of Wheatstone’s musical experiments found their way into the scientific community, as Michael Faraday, the Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, presented Wheatstone’s findings at the Institution in 1828 (pp. 115–116).

As Sarah Hibberd suggests, in the early nineteenth century, music not only aided scientific explanation, but also intervened in contemporary scientific debates. Hibberd traces uses of music in early-nineteenth-century London stage productions of Frankenstein, by Richard Brinsley Peake and Henry Milner. As Hibberd argues, these productions intervened in contemporary scientific debates about vitalism, as music was used to represent ‘vital life force’ on the stage, including the ‘emerging sensibility’ of Frankenstein’s monster (p. 183). While the monster did not speak on stage, he did respond sensitively and emotionally to the music – a detail that, Hibberd argues, aroused audience members’ sympathies (p. 190).

While Hibberd locates music’s role in contemporary scientific debates, Davies and Williams investigate how projects that combined music and science intervened in social or political issues. Davies examines how instruments were used as communication devices in early-nineteenth-century colonial encounters. Scientists like Wheatstone and Alexander Ellis, he contends, embarked on a search for an ‘Instrument of Instruments’ that was capable of emitting a variety of different tonal and scalar systems – a ‘hopeless imperial adventure’, as Davies writes, that reflects the ‘violently imperial projection of global space’ (pp. 147–9). Williams traces Charles Babbage’s campaigns against London street noise as a distraction from his work on his difference engine. Building on Picker’s discussions of Victorian street noise, Williams focuses on the threats sound posed to capitalist productivity and intellectual labour.Footnote ³

Sound Knowledge paints a rich and comprehensive picture of the confluence of music and science in the early-nineteenth century. This collection makes an important contribution to discussions of music and science in the nineteenth century, with its focus on the earlier half of the century, a period relatively unexplored in other studies. At once insistently detailed and accessibly written, the essays in Sound Knowledge will likely be of great interest to musicologists, science historians and scholars of Victorian history, literature and culture. What is richest about Sound Knowledge is its emphasis on the early nineteenth century as a pre-disciplinary milieu and the ‘dizzying variety of arenas’ in which music and science intersected before they became distinct areas of study (p. 4). As scholars in both the humanities and sciences continue to think about ways to bridge fields and reach wider audiences, Sound Knowledge reminds us that truly interdisciplinary work successfully existed in – and deeply enriched – earlier historical moments.