IDEA Lectures with Myles W. Jackson

Photo: Dan Komoda, Institute for Advanced Study

This talk will offer examples on how the history of science and technology can serve as a bridge between music and the natural sciences by discussing how natural scientists and engineers in the 19th and 20th centuries attempted to quantify aesthetic qualities in music. The talk, which is divided into two sections, will discuss 1) the attempts by physicists, physiologists, and physicians to improve piano playing and pedagogy, and 2) the work of engineers, who wanted to improve the fidelity of radio broadcasting, that led to the invention of the trautonium, an electronic musical instrument that could imitate the timbres of acoustic instruments and produce new, “futuristic” tone colors. 

Myles W. Jackson

Myles W. Jackson is the inaugural Albers-Schönberg Professor in the History of Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a professor in the history department at Princeton University.

IDEA Lectures

The IDEA Lectures (Interdisciplinary Debates on the Empirical Aesthetics of Music) aim at bringing together internationally well-known researchers who discuss questions that relate to the production and reception of music from various perspectives. Musicologists from all branches of their discipline take part as do musicians, psychologists, cognitive scientists, sociologists, philosophers and ethnologists.