The Acoustical Paradox: How Music Was Unmoored and Set Adrift from the Sciences in the Seventeenth Century (2024)

The Matter of Hearing: Diderot, d'Alembert, Le Cat, and the Multinaturalist Rationality of 18th Century Sound

Presented at the American Musicological Society Annual Meeting, Milwaukee, November 6, 2014 Few notions have offered as much insight into the diversity of positions regarding the ontology of sound and aurality in the French Enlightenment as the idea of sympathetic resonance. An exemplary version is the one embodied in the metaphor of the human harpsichord, famously explored by Denis Diderot in D'Alembert's Dream. Following cutting-edge eighteenth-century physiology, Diderot invites us to imagine the sensitive organs in human beings as constituted by fibers that resonate like the strings of a harpsichord. For Diderot, we can conceive the relation of bodies to ideas as that of vibrating strings to sound. Not only do the sensitive fibers of our bodies produce ideas as they vibrate, but also, just like the strings of a harpsichord, sympathetic resonance makes adjacent strings vibrate in turn. " If this phenomenon can be observed in musical strings that are separate and inert, why should we not expect to find it wherever living points are connected with each other—why not in sensitive fibers that are continuous? " Diderot thus synthesizes Ancient Greek conceptions of harmony and sympathy with eighteenth-century scientific advances in the physics of sound and the physiology of the body. By comparing resonant strings to organic fibers, Diderot finds matter to be sufficient to account for all sensibility and thought, without needing to presuppose an additional thinking substance, a soul, or a god. In this way, he issues a decidedly materialist challenge to the Cartesian dualism of mind and body and the mechanicist philosophies that followed him. In this crucial moment in the history of aurality, sound and body were figured through each other. This mutual figuration called upon physiology, physics and philosophy in the production of complex entities that effectively redistributed the boundaries between the social and the natural, as well as those between the human and the non-human. I suggest that the current ontological turn, as it is taking place in the fields of anthropology and science and technology studies, STS—and now in musicology—attempts to of 1 7