Thing and Form

Early nineteenth-century attempts to visualize sound waves are traceable across experimentalists from William Swan and John Tyndall to Helmholtz, Jules Lissajous, and Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. A combination of optical and graphic methods proliferated during the 1850s and 1860s, all of which relied—directly or indirectly—on the isochrony of the pendulum. Léon Foucault’s 1851 pendulum experiment to demonstrate the imperceptible rotation of the earth was followed by a flurry of attempts to capture the equivalent invisible motion of sound in space. But from the outset confusions arose over whether the resulting sinusoids and symmetrical patterns were to be understood as describing the shape of sound waves in themselves or merely as symbolic representations, implicating the role of the imagination and viewing technique in experimental work. This led some to doubt the validity of waveforms entirely, returning the discourse on sound to an Aristotelian distinction between immaterial form and material thing, which formed the basis of contentious debates in New York and London between 1877 and 1890. Drawing on experimentalists, composers, mathematicians, and early particle physicists, this article traces debate and disagreement within attempts to visualize sound from Swan’s Y-shaped pendulum in 1848 to Tisley’s harmonograph in 1873, and the latter’s subsequent appropriation by the London Theosophical Society. It also explores Helmholtz’s claim that within the century’s culture of experimentation it is the artist “who has beheld the real,” a proposition tested in programmatic keyboard works concerning waveform by Franz Liszt and Amy Beach.