Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance. A History of Modern Aurality

Abstract

This work traces the genealogy of this 'intimate animosity' between reason and resonance through a series of interrelated case studies involving a varied cast of otologists, philosophers, physiologists, pamphleteers, and music theorists. Introduction: the string and the mirror -- The great entente : anatomy, rationalism, and the quest for reasonance -- Point of audition : Claude Perrault's "du bruit" (1680) and the politics of pleasure in the Ancien Régime -- Good vibes : nerves, air, and happiness during the French Enlightenment -- Water, sex, noise : early German romanticism and the metaphysics of listening -- Hearing oneself hear : the autoresonant self and the expansion of the audible -- The labyrinth of reason : Hermann von Helmholtz's physiological acoustics and the loss of certainty -- Rhythm and clues : time and the acoustic unconscious, ca. 1900 -- Echoless : the pathology of freedom and the crisis of twentieth-century listening.