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Explains that Smith's theory of jurisprudence was derived from the principle of impartiality as perceived by an impartial spectator. It points out that for scientific reasons Smith elevated justice over benevolence and the other virtues, and discusses the implications.

This chapter discusses that what goes on when a listener engages with music is above all a function of how that listener construes the musical event. In particular, it matters if and how the listener believes that there is an intentional agent behind the music. The science of music, with its particular origins, can be presumed to be under constant pressure to align with values of the dominant cultures which support and fund it. These cultures have predominantly economic imperatives which underpin the aims of science to classify and de-individuate in favour of isolating broad trends and key marker variables. There are certain characteristics of the ‘sound of music’, which are shared by several non-musical stimuli, particularly speech, and gesture, which allow simple emotional messages to be ‘read off’ the sound surface, and which allow certain basic effects of arousal modulation to occur.

This book questions the common presupposition that music is conceptually derivative or secondary compared to other modes of thought. This chapter outlines eighteen case studies in which developments in music preceded and arguably influenced subsequent developments in mathematics and physical science. Attempts to make such broad-reaching connections should be circumspect, as should apply to sweeping claims advanced by Erwin Panofsky (about styles in visual art influencing Galileo Galilei) and Stillman Drake (about music as the “mother” of modern science). With that caution in mind, this book argues that, in whatever direction its interventions tended, music so deeply and persistently affected the development of science over so many historical vicissitudes that we should tell their stories jointly. Throughout the book where various sound examples are referenced, please see http://mitpress.mit.edu/musicandmodernscience (please note that the sound examples should be viewed in Chrome or Safari Web browsers).

Dolan argues that Burney’s History of Music (1776-89) marked a major epistemological shift: a change in the kind of “object of knowledge” music was understood to be, bringing along with it new methodologies for its study and classification. While on his tours, Charles Burney was an enthusiastic witness to the demonstration not just of musical technologies, but scientific ones as well. In his travel diaries, instruments like C. P. E. Bach’s Silbermann clavichord in Hamburg bump up against Philip Matthäus Hahn’s orrery in Ludwigsburg, and Padre Boscovich’s Stet Sol in Milan. The chapter postulates that Burney sought to create a comprehensive account of music not by means mathematics-based theory (as in Padre Martini’s Storia della musica of 1757-81) or biography (as in Giorgio Vasari’s 1568 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects), but rather through first-hand experience of musical performance and observation of its instruments. Dolan suggests an affinity between Burney’s History of Music and contemporaneous endeavors in the natural sciences, including his own writings on astronomy, and the taxonomies of his friends Joseph Banks and William Herschel. The chapter explains how, for Burney, music came to be experienced as an object of natural history.

In the mid-1960s, Alvin Lucier composed two works utilizing what he called the natural electromagnetic sounds of brainwaves and natural radio, the former being Music for Solo Performer (1965). Background is given on Lucier’s transition to experimental music composition and to the development of Music for Solo Performer, including his relationship with the physicist Edmond Dewan (who first suggested he use brainwaves, supplied the equipment, and assisted with the process) and his relationship with John Cage. The premier of the work at “A Concert of New Music” at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University is discussed.

Concurrent with the developing plenitude of sounds from the early avant-garde through the experimental arts in the 1960s, exemplified in John Cage’s “For More New Sounds” (1941), was an expansion of signals. This is demonstrated in ideas about earth-scale radio by avant-garde composers and writers and in the history of electronic music. Per the latter, the relationship of musicians to engineers, especially at Bell Labs, is discussed, including Alfred Norton Goldsmith, who stated that electronic music belonged to nature, and Max Mathews. Post-Cagean composers Gordon Mumma and James Tenney are noted as having identified characteristics of a signal plenitude in the astro-bio-geo-physical application in live electronic music and a generalized signal and total transducer, respectively.

Sounds in telephone lines were heard “wirelessly” by inductive “leakage” from one line to another and through circuits returned through the earth, as well as by the reception of electromagnetic waves when lines functioned as unwitting antennas. Examples of “inductive radio” are given, including transmissions of Elisha Gray’s early “musical telephone” heard on telegraph lines other than the ones intended, and similar telephone concerts using Bell’s device. Among the noises routinely heard on the telephone were forms of whistlers and other “musical atmospherics” that were studied scientifically after signal corps operators heard them during World War 1 in field telephones and direction-finding antennas. The musical aesthetics of whistler research to the 1960s are discussed.

This chapter focuses on Henry Cowell's activities in the field of music outside Europe while he was in Berlin in the early 1900s. Henry was trying to promote his concept of “the science of music,” which embraced extra-European cultures. In the 1920s and early 1930s he developed relationships with outstanding performers of non-Western music, including Chinese music. Henry's path toward the systematic study of extra-European music probably included three other influences: explorations of Hindu rhythms around 1916 by Edgard Cheetham, Halcyon's music director; probable conversations with Béla Bartók about folkloric research; and his 1926 trip to the Moravian mountain village. He also undertook a preliminary survey of the most primitive music, from African pygmies, Pangwe (Central Africa), Tierra del Fuego, Borneo, the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, and Malacca. His other projects included setting up Pan American Association of Composers concerts, promoting Nicolas Slonimsky's conducting career, and working with Edgard Varèse on a plan for concerts in the Soviet Union.