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Music played a significant role in the making of modern science. In ancient Greek natural philosophy, music formed the earthly meeting place between numbers and perception. For the next two millennia, music remained a central part of higher education, united with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy in the quadrivium. Accordingly, innovations reverberated between all these fields. This book presents the “scientific revolution” more as a phase in the restoration and augmentation of the ancient project of musicalizing the world than a change in the basic project of natural philosophy. After discussing the original Pythagorean synthesis of music, mathematics, and sense-experiment, the book presents cases in which prior developments in music led to some new direction in science from the fourteenth century to the twentieth. These include encounters between harmony and fifteenth-century cosmological controversies, between musical initiatives and irrational numbers, between vibrating bodies and emergent electromagnetism. The book presents new accounts of Johannes Kepler’s use of music, of René Descartes’s and Marin Mersenne’s interweaving of music and natural philosophy, of Isaac Newton’s imposition of the musical scale on color, of Leonhard Euler’s musical work in relation to his mathematics and optical theory, of Thomas Young’s musical optics, of Hermann von Helmholtz’s and Bernhard Riemann’s development of new concepts of space from studies of seeing and hearing, of atomic spectra as overtones, of Max Planck’s experiments with harmoniums and choruses in relation to his subsequent quantum theory, and of the continuing quest for cosmic harmonies in contemporary physics.

Voice leading is the musical art of combining sounds over time. This book offers an accessible account of the cognitive and perceptual foundations of voice leading. Drawing on decades of scientific research, explanations are provided for many practices and phenomena, including the perceptual dominance of the highest voice, chordal-tone doubling, direct octaves, embellishing tones, and the musical feeling of sounds “leading” somewhere. The traditional rules of voice leading are shown to align almost perfectly with modern scientific accounts of auditory perception. Expanding beyond chorale-style writing, the book shows how established perceptual principles can be used to compose, analyze, and critically understand any kind of acoustical texture from tune-and-accompaniment songs and symphonic orchestration to jazz combo arranging and abstract electroacoustic music. Finally, the book also reviews pertinent research establishing the role of learning and enculturation in auditory and musical perception.

Moved by Aboriginal or Indigenous understandings of tracks, Norie Neumark’s Voicetracks seeks to deepen understandings of voice through listening to a variety of media and contemporary art works from Australia, Europe, and the United States. The author aims to bring voice studies into conversation with new materialism to broaden thinking within both. Through a methodology based in listening, she brings theories of affect and carnal and situated knowledge into conversation with her examples and the theories she works with. Through her examples, Neumark engages with artists working with animal sounds and voices; voices of place, placed voices in installation works; voices of technology; and “unvoicing,” disturbances in the image/voice relationship and in the idea of what voice is. Neumark evokes both the literal—the actual voices within the works with which she engages—and the metaphorical—in a new materialist exploration of voice encompassing humans, animals, things, and assemblages. Not content with the often dry tone of academic writing, the author engages a “wayfaring” process that brings together theories from sound, animal, and posthuman studies in order to change the ways we think about and act with and within the assemblages of living creatures, things, places and histories around us. Finally, she considers ethics and politics, and describes how her own work has shaped her understandings and apprehensions of voice.