Music and the Making of Modern Science

Pesic, Peter

doi:10.7551/mitpress/9844.001.0001

Cited by 8 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…Infant ability to process music emotional valence has been revealed with the use of musical excerpts differing in such important acoustic properties as tempo (fast vs. slow) and scale (major vs. minor). In particular, it is well established that music in a major scale with fast tempo universally conveys happy emotional valence, whereas music in a minor scale with slow tempo conveys sad emotional valence (Gabrielsson & Lindström, ; Pesic, ), with a strong neural basis (e.g. Mitterschiffthaler, Fu, Dalton, Andrew, & Williams, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We matched each musical excerpt to the same perceived loudness (−23 dB). Since the time of Euler, emotion in music has been shown mathematically and empirically to be conveyed primarily by scale and tempo (Gabrielsson & Lindström, ; Pesic, ). Thus, we specifically chose happy and sad musical excerpts that differed in these two key musical properties so as to ensure that the excerpts clearly presented happy and sad emotional valences.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Older but not younger infants associate own‐race faces with happy music and other‐race faces with sad music

Xiao

Quinn

Liu

et al. 2017

Developmental Science

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We used a novel intermodal association task to examine whether infants associate own- and other-race faces with music of different emotional valences. Three- to 9-month-olds saw a series of neutral own- or other-race faces paired with happy or sad musical excerpts. Three- to 6-month-olds did not show any specific association between face race and music. At 9 months, however, infants looked longer at own-race faces paired with happy music than at own-race faces paired with sad music. Nine-month-olds also looked longer at other-race faces paired with sad music than at other-race faces paired with happy music. These results indicate that infants with nearly exclusive own-race face experience develop associations between face race and music emotional valence in the first year of life. The potential implications of such associations for developing racial biases in early childhood are discussed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Older but not younger infants associate own‐race faces with happy music and other‐race faces with sad music

Xiao

Quinn

Liu

et al. 2017

Developmental Science

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“…However, as Peter Pesic and Ryan Tweney have both argued, the timing of these experiments seems highly relevant to Faraday's subsequent, almost immediate, observation of electromagnetic induction. 9 Faraday had invested considerable time and effort in attempting to produce the phenomenon during the 1820s, without success. What he recognised, within a few days of revisiting the problem on 29 August 1831, was that electricity was only caused by an impulse: it was the magnet's movement that caused a brief electric impulse and it required repeated motions with the magnet through the coil to sustain an electric current.…”

Section: Sonorous Investigations Of Naturementioning

confidence: 99%

Seismology’s acoustic debt: Robert Mallet, Chladni’s figures, and the Victorian science of earthquakes

Gillin

2019

Sound Studies

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In the nineteenth century, Ernst Chladni's acoustic figures provided productive new experimental techniques for investigating natural phenomena. The movement of invisible forces, such as light, electricity, magnetism, and heat, were hard for natural philosophers to examine. But Chladni's use of vibrating glass plates and sand to reveal the wave motions of sound offered an experimental framework through which to make natural phenomena visible. In Britain, it was Michael Faraday and Charles Wheatstone in the 1820s and 1830s who made best use of these practices and apparatus. Sound waves also provided new ways of thinking about earthquakes and seismic phenomena. This article explores how Robert Mallet, the first self-styled "seismologist", examined earthquakes, drawing on broader philosophical work surrounding vibrations and acoustic waves. Mallet was keen to draw parallels between the movement of seismic shock waves and the movement of musical sounds, including those from a piano moving through a room. He was not alone in this respect. Charles Darwin, among others, noticed comparisons between the sonorous and the seismic. By contextualising Victorian seismology within the context of Victorian acoustic science, this article argues that the two disciplines were deeply connected.

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“…Peter Pesic's history of musical science refuses even to go there, the author's survey terminating abruptly at 1900. 28 In 2015 a well-known mathematics nonfiction author can still write: 'The sound wave made by a tuning fork is a sinusoid. So, in order to recreate the sound of a clarinet, all that is required is to play a selection of tuning forks at the correct frequencies and amplitudes', a definition not only musically incorrect in every particular, but wildly out of date: synthesizing sounds from blended tuning forks was a fancy peculiar to the Olson-Belar designed RCA synthesizers from the heyday of Milton Babbitt 60 years ago.…”

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confidence: 99%

Boulez, Information Science and Ircam

Maconie¹

2016

Tempo

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The rise of information science and its effect on contemporary arts is a topic raised in Stravinsky and Craft's Memories and Commentaries in 1959. It makes sense to inquire how the fundamental priorities and exact discriminations of communications science might have altered the ground rules of musical invention and contemporary listening habits. Answers lie thin on the ground, the few composers most deeply implicated in the information revolution – Babbitt, Boulez, Stockhausen and Cage in particular – having chosen to remain silent on issues relating to the hidden side of the avant-garde. ‘No gossip!’ said Stockhausen to me, in a blunt email in 1998.

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Music and the Making of Modern Science

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Older but not younger infants associate own‐race faces with happy music and other‐race faces with sad music

Older but not younger infants associate own‐race faces with happy music and other‐race faces with sad music

Seismology’s acoustic debt: Robert Mallet, Chladni’s figures, and the Victorian science of earthquakes

Boulez, Information Science and Ircam

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