Toward a New Organology: Instruments of Music and Science

Abstract

The Renaissance genre of organological treatises inventoried the forms and functions of musical instruments. This article proposes an update and expansion of the organological tradition, examining the discourses and practices surrounding both musical and scientifi c instruments. Drawing on examples from many periods and genres, we aim to capture instruments' diverse ways of life. To that end we propose and describe a comparative "ethics of instruments": an analysis of instruments' material configurations, social and institutional locations, degrees of freedom, and teleologies. This perspective makes it possible to trace the intersecting and at times divergent histories of science and music: their shared material practices, aesthetic commitments, and attitudes toward technology, as well as their impact on understandings of human agency and the order of nature. Disciplines Music | Musicology ABSTRACTThe Renaissance genre of organological treatises inventoried the forms and functions of musical instruments. This article proposes an update and expansion of the organological tradition, examining the discourses and practices surrounding both musical and scientifi c instruments. Drawing on examples from many periods and genres, we aim to capture instruments' diverse ways of life. To that end we propose and describe a comparative "ethics of instruments": an analysis of instruments' material confi gurations, social and institutional locations, degrees of freedom, and teleologies. This perspective makes it possible to trace the intersecting and at times divergent histories of science and music: their shared material practices, aesthetic commitments, and attitudes toward technology, as well as their impact on understandings of human agency and the order of nature.

Acoustic Constraints and Musical Consequences: Exploring Composers' Use of Cues for Musical Emotion

“…These results hold potentially useful insights pertinent to the emerging field of “critical organology,” which explores the relationship between instruments and their artistic roles/functions (Tresch and Dolan, 2013 ). Scholars in that discipline examine a variety of issues related to instruments and compositions, such as how the influence of string layout on a violin encourages certain types of melodies (De Souza, 2017 ).…”

Listening to the Cold War: The Nuclear Test Ban Negotiations, Seismology, and Psychoacoustics, 1958–1963

“…Thus, while musicians contributed to solving the discrimination problem in the psychoacoustic laboratory, the seismograms that were created for acoustic representation were eventually turned into aesthetic objects in the form of computer music. 73 As this episode shows, the entwined histories of Western science and music remain closely linked, 74 even in the era of computer-generated music and practices of so-called time axis manipulation. 75 Meanwhile, Speeth continued to work on the detection problem in his free time.…”

Musical Organics: A Heterarchical Approach to Digital Organology

“…Bates applies actor-network theory in analysing how instruments are more than simple objects applied in music making, but actually serve as complex actor-networks of meaning, history, and agency. A related approach is taken by Tresch and Dolan (2013) in their 'Toward a New Organology: Instruments of Music and Science', where they apply the same type of organological classification to both scientific and musical instruments-one based on ethics. Building their system on the later work of Foucault, they propose the following categories for instrumental ethics: (1) material disposition, or what kind of assemblage the instrument is; (2) mode of mediation, or how the instrument's action is seen as autonomous or passive, modifying or transparent, hidden or visible; (3) map of mediations, or musical context, material conditions, protocols and institutions; (4) the instrument's telos, or its ends.…”