Sound Authorities

Edward J. Gillin is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Leeds. He is the author of The Palace of Science: Scientific Knowledge and the Building of the Victorian Houses of Parliament and Entente Imperial: British and French Power in the Age of Empire. He is coeditor, with H. Horatio Joyce, of Experiencing Architecture in the Nineteenth Century: Buildings and Society in the Modern Age.

• List of Figures and TablesIntroduction: Sounds and Sweet Airs: Science, Sound, and Music in Britain, 1815–1914Part I Experiments and Mathematics: The Making of Sound as a Scientific ObjectChapter 1 The Laboratory of Harmony: The Transformation of Sound within British Science, 1815–46Chapter 2 A Harmonious Universe: Herschel, Whewell, Somerville, and the Place of Sound in British Mathematics, 1830–70Part II Contesting Knowledge: Mathematicians, Musicians, and Sound MeasurementsChapter 3 The Problem of Pitch: Mathematical Authority and the Mid-Victorian Search for a Musical StandardChapter 4 Accuracy and Audibility: Mathematics, Musical Consensus, and the Unreliability of Sound, 1835–81Part III Materialism and Morality: Religious Authority and the Science of SoundChapter 5 Musical Matter: Religious Authority, John Tyndall, and the Challenge of Materialism, 1859–1914Epilogue: Musical Spiders and Sounds Scientific in the Modern AgeAcknowledgmentsNotesSelect BibliographyIndex

“This book reveals the Victorians as you’ve never heard them before. Music, often associated in the nineteenth century with the emotional, spiritual, and aesthetic aspects of life, was also simultaneously the subject of science. Edward Gillin engagingly traces the traffic between concert halls, shops, laboratories, and lecture theaters that made it possible to think about sound scientifically. In doing so, he adds a new sense to our understanding of science in the making of the modern world.”