Largely unnoticed by many of us, electroacoustics – the science of translating sounds into electrical signals and back again – permeates our lives through the many and varied applications of microphones and loudspeakers. However, as Roland Wittje points out in the introduction to this detailed and meticulously researched study, it is a subject that has received scant attention previously in the history of science, being largely treated as the story of the technologies involved (see, for example, Frederick Vinton Hunt's Electroacoustics (1954) or Emily Thompson's Soundscape of Modernity (2002)). Wittje attributes this relative neglect to the ambiguous position of electroacoustics and, more broadly, acoustics itself, which is often perceived as falling between science and engineering, and between pure and applied science. He seeks to redress this by situating acoustics within a broader history of science, expanding beyond the normative idea-focused view of early twentieth-century physics, to privilege practice and application, and thus to connect the history of physics to histories of technology, to cultural histories of sound and to sound studies.
Wittje promotes acoustics as neither a trivial topic nor a dull application of physics through a detailed account of the development of electroacoustics in Germany, from the work of Helmholtz, through militarization during the First World War and demilitarization in the Weimar Republic, to the beginning of the Third Reich and remilitarization, and in so doing draws on a rich body of important German-language sources and archives. He highlights the place of electroacoustics as an ideal instantiation of ‘German physics’, since it was seen by the National Socialists as a practical, applied science, with very useful applications, especially as part of the apparatus of propaganda – and hence very separate from the perceived worst excesses of ‘Jewish science’, such as quantum mechanics or relativity.
During the period of this book – the late nineteenth century to the late 1930s – acoustics changed from being a bourgeois science for the elite, focusing on the interaction between classical music and the trained, aesthetic ear, to a technical discipline informed by electrical engineering: from concert hall and drawing room to factory floor and theatre of war (though we might wonder how successfully this elitism has been eradicated when we consider the supremely precise acoustic design of some classical venues such as Birmingham Symphony Hall, for example, versus the ‘warehouse’ aesthetic of many popular arena venues). This, therefore, is a story of electrification and industrialization, whereby the arbitration of sound moves from the musically trained human ear, via the ‘normal’ human ear as defined in Harvey Fletcher's work at Bell Laboratories in the 1920s, to electronic measurement and meters (which connects in interesting ways with Marc Perlman's classic article ‘Golden ears and meter readers: the contest for epistemic authority in audiophilia’ (Social Studies of Science (2004) 34(5), pp. 783–807).
Wittje further compellingly argues that this period also ushers in a change in understandings of sound and of noise, and that electroacoustics brings a new ‘conceptual definition of sound’ (p. 19). Sound segues from that which is aesthetically desirable to that which is practically necessary, i.e. the signal, while noise ceases to be a culturally defined subjective phenomenon and becomes a measurable distortion of that signal. The First World War was a crucial driver of this change, creating as it did new kinds of sound to be studied and a more urgent need to detect and analyse those sounds. However, Wittje is careful to emphasize that the electrification of acoustics originates well before this; the key drivers and consumers of acoustic research were telephony, radio and film sound, all of which were all well under way before 1914.
The expanding needs of the communication and media industries meant that, by the 1930s, acoustics had become a global activity. Furthermore, as the sound of modernity became louder and more urgent, with increasing industry, traffic and sound-based media, problems of noise measurement and control needed to be addressed, which further cemented the status of acoustics.
Wittje takes a novel approach to the concept of noise, aided by precise distinctions in the German language, arguing that there are three key developments affecting our concept of noise. First, the advent and nature of the First World War meant that acoustics turned away from a focus on the sound of music to attend to the noise of war. Second, growth in media technologies, especially telephony, radio and film, necessitated an electrical turn in acoustics. Finally, the rise of comparative musicology, together with the growth of mass culture, broadened musical thinking to encompass a range of sounds beyond the realm of classical Western music (pp. 190–192).
Wittje argues, convincingly in my view, not only that the received view of acoustics as a branch of engineering or applied science, rather than an element of ‘modern physics’, is mistaken, but also that acoustics, and especially electroacoustics, was an important ingredient in the transformation of physics in the 1920s and 1930s, offering ‘a different vision of what modern physics could be like’ (p. 194). The importance of industrial laboratories in physics, such as the role of radio technology and innovation in experimental nuclear physics, has been previously acknowledged and Wittje argues that technical acoustics and electroacoustics led the way in this. Even earlier, acoustics was the gateway to vibrational understandings of physical phenomena, through the ‘analogy between acoustics and electromagnetic oscillations’ (pp. 190–192). Rayleigh's theory of sound played an important part in Maxwellian electrodynamics and acoustic wave theory remained pertinent to the development of quantum mechanics and relativity.
This detailed, meticulously researched and well-illustrated book is a welcome addition to the growing, multidisciplinary body of literature which takes issues of sound seriously. Wittje concludes with a brief comment on the significant ways in which digital technologies have changed our understandings of sound (p. 213), but the movement of sound waves in air will always remain a defining characteristic of electroacoustics, as long as there are ears to hear.
