Research Catalogue

This article addresses the auditory culture of science and problematizes sonic practices as epistemological practices. In order to deepen our understanding about how scientific knowledge is acquired, represented, and constructed through sound, I discuss case studies from the history of medicine and the life sciences in which sound and listening do not form the objects of scientific observation and reasoning but epistemic tools employed by scientists to produce “sound” scientific facts. First I reassess the question why physicians began to listen to the sounds of the human body in order to diagnose diseases around 1800. After that, I follow late nineteenth-century neurophysiologists who used the electric telephone to study the nervous system by transforming bioelectric currents into sounds. I argue that such acoustemic practices and technologies favorably emerge in the presence of in-visibilities, i.e. situations in which a direct visual observation or representation of the object of study is hindered or impossible. I also show that the success of these practices largely depends on whether or not it is possible to develop the sounds of science into stable frameworks of sonic facts.

String theory posits very small “strings” whose various modes of vibration produce the observed particles and forces of nature, often described through analogies with music, especially Pythagorean harmonies. We analyze the rationales and implications for enlisting this archaic lore to explain such a modern theory, especially factors connecting internal and external aspects of scientific research: the economic pressure to promote a promising but unproven theory, the quasi-religious appeal of Pythagorean teachings and their consequent aesthetics of the “beautiful theory.” In contrast, sonifications of high energy physics data from the LHC seems to refer more to contemporary music than the “cosmic music” pioneered by Beethoven and carried forward by Stravinsky and Schoenberg.