Music: Scientists

In 1862 a mustachioed German physicist, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, published an enormous volume on the physics and psychology of musical sound. Its enormous title: Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als Physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik. Terser English translators called it Sensations of Tone. Composers and prima donnas paid little attention to Physicist von Helmholtz’ monumental brainwork, but the science of acoustics was groggy from it for half a century.

Even Heavyweight von Helmholtz was unable to explain what made the simplest wheels of a musical composition go round. But ever since his time rubber-gloved scientists have been trying to get music and musicians into test tubes and under microscopes. Today’s No. 1 and 2 musical microbe hunters are flute-playing, Einstein-disputing Professor Dayton C. Miller of Cleveland’s Case School of Applied Science, and Iowa State University’s dapper, white-haired Dean Emeritus Carl Emil Seashore. While Physicist Miller has succeeded in taking up where the doughty von Helmholtz left off, Psychologist Seashore has spent a lifetime on the beach of music’s ocean brooding over, and trying to remedy, the mathematical inaccuracies of long-haired musicians. From spry, 72-year-old Seashore’s laboratory have come rhythm meters to test the sense of rhythm, charts showing how often great singers sing out of tune, elaborate methods of detecting musical talent. A few of Psychologist Seashore’s ideas have been practical enough for practical musicians to monkey with.

Last week a new flood of scientific ideas and gadgets descended upon the musical world. Gadget No. 1 was the chromatic stroboscope. Conceived by Indiana University’s Professor Ora L. Railsback and developed by Physicist Robert William Young and Engineers Allen Loomis and O. Hugo Schuck. it was demonstrated at the Music Educators’ National Conference in St. Louis. The Young, Loomis & Schuck stroboscope, which sits on a table, blinks and flickers when anybody sings out of tune in its presence, makes caterwauling detectible even to the deaf.

Ideas included a new technique developed by German psychologists, for revealing musical talent in one-year-old infants. System: Stimulate subject 1) by striking a clear-toned bell. 2) by uttering a Bronx cheer. If subject goo-goos pleasure at sound of bell and cries at sound of Bronx cheer, musical talent is not necessarily proved, may be reasonably suspected.

Milestone of Science No. 1, however, was contributed by Columbia University’s Dr. Gregory S. Razran, reporting results of a year’s experiment at a meeting of the American Psychological Association in Manhattan. Subject: the effects of free lunch on various forms of artistic appreciation (see p. 54). Psychologist Razran’s conclusions indicated that with enough free lunch “you can practically make an individual like anything.” He admitted that it took one subject five lunches before she liked the piano music of Modernist Aaron Copland. “But she did come to like it, and after she did, gave all sorts of reasons why it was beautiful.”