Senses of Vibration

A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound

Shelley Trower

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781441148636
• eBook ISBN: 9781441128041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

The study of the senses has become a rich topic in recent years. Senses of Vibration explores a wide range of sensory experience and makes a decisive new contribution to this growing field by focussing not simply on the senses as such, but on the material experience - vibration - that underpins them.
This is the first book to take the theme of vibration as central, offering an interdisciplinary history of the phenomenon and its reverberations in the cultural imaginary. It tracks vibration through the work of a wide range of writers, including physiologists (who thought vibrations in the nerves delivered sensations to the brain), physicists (who claimed that light, heat, electricity and other forms of energy were vibratory), spiritualists (who figured that spiritual energies also existed in vibratory form), and poets and novelists from Coleridge to Dickens and Wells. Senses of Vibration is a work of scholarship that cuts through a range of disciplines and will reverberate for many years to come. Cover photograph courtesy of Andrew Davidhazy.

CHAPTER ONE
Nervous Motions

The aeolian harp (also known as the ‘wind-harp’), a technology which turned wind into sound¹, was first described in poetry in 1748, in James Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, where it is said to have an almost magical effect on the human body and mind. The sounds of the harp’s strings, blown by the wind, ‘Lulled the weak bosom, and induced ease. […] Here soothed the pensive melancholy mind’.² By the end of the century the harp had its dedicatory poems and appreciative descriptions in numerous prose works, from novels to scientific analyses of acoustics³, and had become renowned not only as an instrument that influences body and mind, as in Thomson’s poem, but as a way of explaining their workings.

This chapter examines the use of the aeolian harp as a model for human nerves, corresponding with a shift in the understanding of the physical basis of human sensitivity. By the end of the eighteenth century a new understanding of the nerves as solid, like musical strings, began to replace the earlier idea that nerves are hollow, and that animal spirits flow through them (superfine fluids, almost immaterial, were thought to flow between soul and body). Vibrations in solid nerves delivered sensations to the brain, according to an increasing number of philosophers, anatomists, neurologists and medical practitioners like David Hartley who made a major contribution to this new theorization in his Observations on Man (first published in 1749). Followers of this theory began to see the aeolian harp as a model for a human mind/body conceived as a machine for translating sensory vibrations into consciousness. It became an image of the doctrine of association. The aeolian harp did more, though, than provide an image of passively vibrating ‘nerve-strings’: it was creative as well as sensitive, transforming the force of the wind into harmonious sounds. Focusing initially on Coleridge’s ‘The Aeolian Harp’ (first composed in 1795), I track how the harp as a metaphor for the sensitive and imaginative, creative poet, corresponds with Hartley’s materialist account of both perception and creativity, of receptive and responsive motions, or ‘incoming’ and ‘outgoing’ vibrations. Hartley claimed that vibrations travel along the ‘motory’ as well as ‘sensory’ nerves, leading to muscular action, whether that is walking, writing, or reciting poetry. The harmonious vibrations of ‘The Aeolian Harp’, however, are subsequently transformed into the screaming noises of ‘Dejection’ (1802) and the trembling bodies of Gothic novels. As medical writers increasingly viewed nervous vibrations as a cause of pain and illness, sensitivity and harmony began in literary descriptions around the turn of the century to give way to trembling and convulsions, the vibratory movements of nervousness and suffering. But some medical writers also viewed painful, violent vibrations, at least within certain limits, as a powerful, even life-giving stimulus. Vibration, in other words, could be experienced as both painful and pleasurable, as a dangerous and as a healing force.

Many historians and critics have looked at theories of mind developed by the ‘sensualist philosophers’ who conceived of it as a mechanical, passive receiver of sense data.⁴ More specifically, critics have frequently compared the mechanism of the harp to the passive mind as conceived by Hartley, and as depicted in Coleridge’s poetry prior to his maturer engagement with idealist philosophy⁵, while I, by contrast, will develop a more detailed comparison between physiological and medical theories – focusing initially on Hartley’s – and poetic descriptions of the harp. This chapter provides a materialist account of mind, emphasising its inseparability from the body and physical world, as a corrective to the tendency in past criticism to overemphasize the transcendental aspect of the Romantic worldview and its attendant poetics. The extent of Hartley’s influence on Coleridge has been a subject of quite lengthy debate⁶, but a key limitation in much of this discussion is that critics tended to rely upon a disembodied version of the theory of associationism. As Alan Richardson points out, in a study of ‘neural Romanticism’, analyses of the Romantic mind tended to ignore its material support – the brain, even though historians of neurology and psychology viewed this period as crucial for the emergence of theories and discoveries concerning the brain and nervous system – increasingly viewed as the seat of consciousness.⁷ Critics have recently intensified their focus on the body in Romanticism, previously often overlooked in the canonical understanding that Romantic poetry sought, through the creative power of the mind – of thought, memory, imagination – to transcend the material body and world, to reach an ideal or spiritual realm.⁸ My aim here is thus to identify a materialist, vibratory undercurrent through neurological and medical theories and poetry of the era. By viewing the Romantic mind as embodied I am by now predictably engaging with that trajectory of work that has developed and critiqued Jonathan Crary’s insights about the role of the body in perception, where he argues that the empirical sciences and new technologies between 1810 and 1840 ‘severed’ sensory experience from any direct relation to an external world. Vision, the sense on which Crary focuses, was ‘relocated in the human body’, and thus ‘knowledge was accumulated about the constitutive role of the body in the apprehension of a visible world’.⁹ For Crary, there is a sharp break between classical models of vision and the ‘subjective vision’ developed after 1810, when sensations were no longer seen to originate in the external world but in the body. Crary focuses on optical instruments like the camera obscura and magic lantern, whereas the aeolian harp provides an earlier, acoustic model of embodied consciousness, which could serve as a bridge between the ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ accounts of sensitivity. This model presents sensations as originating in both an external stimulus and the body, especially the nervous system. Further, the aeolian harp also allows me to introduce the role of technology in mediating information. Both Crary and Friedrich Kittler have identified a historical shift toward an understanding of perceptual processes as unconscious and automatic, or mechanical, but where Crary focuses on bodily perception, Kittler goes further with his argument that media – ranging from the wax slate or book to the gramophone and digital technologies – are also capable of registering and storing sensory information. According to Kittler, ‘we knew nothing about our senses until media provided models and metaphors’.¹⁰ By taking the aeolian harp as a model for sensory perception, this chapter works toward an understanding of vibration as the force that is imagined to stimulate the human mind and body – both conceived as matter – into mechanical life and consciousness.

‘The Aeolian Harp’ and ‘Dejection’ draw on the physiology of vibrations and sensations set out in Observations on Man, though they may also be seen to question it. It was just when Coleridge was most explicitly devoted to Hartleyan doctrine (as a result of which he had named his son Hartley in 1796) that he wrote ‘The Aeolian Harp’.¹¹ It was only later that Coleridge’s extensive criticism of Hartley appeared in Biographia Literaria (1817), in which he argued that associationism is unable to account for active and creative mental faculties such as will and imagination, as it renders the mind passive and mechanical, determined by the ‘despotism of outward impressions’.¹² Coleridge’s denunciations have often been taken to support the idea of Hartley’s theory as a mechanical and sterile system, utterly incompatible with the creative mind of Romanticism, but there is much debate regarding Hartley’s influence, which others have explored in more depth with respect to Coleridge’s ambivalence, for example.¹³ Coleridge became an influential critic of associationism and supporter of Kantian philosophy, but the physiological approach to psychology was by no means abandoned, as both Richardson and Rick Rylance, in his history of Victorian psychology, have observed. Writers such as George Henry Lewes and John Stuart Mill, Rylance notes, ‘championed Hartley as a pioneer of the physiological psychology of the 1860s and 1870s’.¹⁴

Nerves vibrate, like strings

‘The doctrine of vibrations’ as set out in Hartley’s Observations on Man, asserts that vibrations in the nerves transmit sensations.¹⁵ Sensations generate ideas, which in turn generate thought and feeling, memory and other aspects of mental life. ‘The doctrine of association’ explains how increasingly complex ideas are built up from sensations by means of association, a process through which ideas are combined. As many historians have observed, Hartley’s work was probably the first comprehensive attempt to integrate associationist philosophy with Newtonian physics, to ground mental processes in the physical. Drawing on the work of John Locke and others who developed associationist theories, Hartley sought to ground philosophy of mind in corporeal foundations: the anatomy and motions of the nerves and brain.¹⁶

Drawing on Newton’s Principia and the ‘Queries’ to Opticks, Hartley proposed that ‘motions’ from the external world cause vibrations to run along the ‘medullary substance’ of the nerves, which consists of particles small enough to transmit rather than interrupt the vibrations, the pores or spaces between which are filled with even smaller, ‘infinitesimal’ particles of ether. This understanding of the nerves differed from the alternative theory that the nerves are hollow, through which animal spirits flow (superfine fluids were thought to flow between soul and body). Hartley writes that ‘the nerves are rather solid capillaments, according to Sir Isaac Newton, than small tubuli, according to Boerhaave’ (OM, 17). While earlier philosophers including Descartes and Malebranche had claimed that animal spirits flow in a vibratory or wave-like manner, for Hartley vibration itself is transmitted along the nerves. Rather than a stream of spirits running through the tubular nerves it is solely the motion that is transmitted, triggering further vibrations (‘vibratiuncles’) in the medullary substance of the brain.

In the seventeenth century, the theory of animal spirits was occasionally challenged. Penelope Gouk notes that from the early 1700s Boerhaave’s physiology was taught in medical schools throughout Europe, but the structure of the nerves was debatable: ‘Some physicians conceptualized them as small pipes through which the animal spirits flowed like a fine liquor. Others claimed the nerves to be more like strings that communicated their effects through elastic, vibrative motion’.¹⁷ Gouk also observes that doctors were beginning to use acoustic technologies in the seventeenth century to explain how the eardrum resonates with vibrations of the air. The anatomist Joseph Du Verney employed the image of sympathetic resonance between lute strings to explain the ear’s response to sound: ‘these vibrations were then transmitted to the cochlea and labyrinth by means of the auditory ossicles in the same way that the vibrations of a string on one lute were transmitted to a string on a neighboring lute via their bodies and the table’.¹⁸ These vibrations often came to a halt, however, as many doctors still thought that the sounds were then carried by animal spirits along the nerves to the brain.¹⁹ Hartley in contrast used the understanding of the anatomy of the ear to support his claims that much smaller or ‘more subtle’ vibrations are transmitted through the ether, though these cannot themselves be sensed:

As sounds are caused by pulses or vibrations excited in the air by the tremors of the parts of sounding bodies, they must raise vibrations in the membrana tympani; and the small bones of the ear seem peculiarly adapted, by their situation and muscles, to communicate these vibrations to the cavities of the vestibulum, semicircular canals, and cochlea, in which the auditory nerve is expanded; i.e. to the nerve itself. Now these are gross vibrations, in respect of those which we must suppose to take place in the ether itself, yet they prepare the way for the supposition of the more subtle vibrations of the ether. (OM, 26–7)

The use in the seventeenth century of that other sonorous mechanism – musical strings – as a model for human sensitivities indicates that there is no sudden shift to a completely new paradigm, but it was not until the late eighteenth century that the theory of animal spirits was giving way to the understanding of vibrating nerves being more like the ear or strings than pipes. Hartley’s work can be seen as an early and speculative line of investigation into this area. The debate around whether nerves are string-like or tubular is discussed in many historical accounts of neurology, which generally agree that around the turn of the century anatomical discoveries with microscopes began to establish the solidity of the nerves. Edwin Clarke for example shows that the idea of tubular nerves ‘endured virtually intact throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, but not into the nineteenth. He claims that it was only at the turn of the eighteenth century that the nerve fibre began to be recognized.²⁰ Beyond the scientific debate, however, the increasing use in the eighteenth century of musical strings as an image of nerves conveyed the idea of their solidity, and capacity to vibrate, to a wider public.

During the eighteenth century strings increasingly provided a model of the nerves, along which vibrations convey sensations to the brain, including sensations of sound, light and heat, and pleasure and pain. It is in this context that Joseph Roach, tracing the relations between scientific ideas of the body and theories of acting, writes that while ‘seventeenth century authors favored images of bodily and vocal eloquence based on wind or brass instruments, those in the eighteenth century showed a decided preference for strings – violins or harpsichords’.²¹ Roach examines the move from animal spirits to sensibility, from the idea that the soul governs the body to the idea that humans are sensitive and responsive to external stimuli. ‘Animal’ refers to the soul or anima; it was thought that the spirits were governed by or animated from within, by the soul or ‘ghost in the machine’, rather than the later idea that mental life is determined by vibrations. The spirits conveyed information about the world to the soul, and conveyed from the soul to the body information or directions for movement, for muscular action. Roach id...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Hearing vibrations
• 1 Nervous Motions
• 2 Psychophysical Sensations and Spiritual Vibrations
• 3 Wires, Rays and Radio Waves
• 4 Pathological Motions: Railway Shock, Street Noises, Earthquakes
• 5 Sexual Health: Sewing Machines, Bicycle Spine, the Vibrator
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index