In my work I investigate concepts that constitute our present understanding of sound, hearing and music in three different historic constellations. Knowledge about acoustics that had been guided by the symbolic code of music far into the nineteenth century began to be transformed step by step into an experimental science on hearing. My project consists of three parts: First, I analyze the relation between physiology, psychology, and the aesthetics of the acoustic around 1850; second, I reconstruct attempts to reconcile the diverging disciplines of aesthetics and scientific investigation into hearing between 1900 and 1930 in Berlin and Moscow; a third part, "Music and Media after 1945," discusses the history of composition from the perspective of medial historiography. In my talk I will focus on the notion of “Klangfarbe” (timbre, tone color) for which Hermann von Helmholtz provided a new definition that became central for musical aesthetics in the twentieth century and is until now used in psychoacoustic research.
