Kursell Julia
Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin.
Ber Wiss. 2008 Jun;31(2):130-43. doi: 10.1002/bewi.200801314.
The article juxtaposes Hermann von Helmholtz's work in the experimental physiology of hearing and Carl Stumpf's tone psychology, focusing on the problem of consonance and dissonance in music. It argues that the experimental set-up plays a major role in the approaches to hearing of both Helmholtz and Stumpf, shaping their redefinition of the musical concepts of consonance and dissonance. Helmholtz, however, explains dissonance as resulting from the beats that are heard when sound waves interfere, while Stumpf explains consonance from the fusion (Verschmelzung) of sounds, noting that two tones, depending on their distance cannot always be recognized as two but are heard as one single tone. Helmholtz's definition of dissonance eventually threatens his own theory of hearing, which is based on the mechanical principle of resonance and considers sound to be composed of sinusoidal waves. Both the physical and the mathematical tools he uses cannot easily be brought into accordance with his experimental findings on beats, which ask for a discrimination of fast changes in intensity. Dissonance thus becomes "unrecomendable" for Helmholtz, because it overstrains the ear. Stumpf's research, in contrast, has its point of departure in the historically given set of intervals and tries to find a principle that would explain this choice. His tests with experimental subjects who have no conscious knowledge of musical harmony and prove incapable to follow or reproduce music reveals to him a difference between the unity and multiplicity of tones.
这篇文章将赫尔曼·冯·亥姆霍兹在听觉实验生理学方面的工作与卡尔·施图姆普夫的音调心理学并列起来，重点关注音乐中的协和与不协和问题。文章认为，实验装置在亥姆霍兹和施图姆普夫的听觉研究方法中都起着重要作用，塑造了他们对协和与不协和这两个音乐概念的重新定义。然而，亥姆霍兹将不协和解释为声波干涉时听到的拍频所致，而施图姆普夫则从声音的融合（Verschmelzung）来解释协和，并指出两个音，取决于它们之间的距离，并不总是能被识别为两个音，而是被听作一个单音。亥姆霍兹对不协和的定义最终威胁到了他自己基于共振力学原理且认为声音由正弦波组成的听觉理论。他所使用的物理和数学工具都难以轻易地与他关于拍频的实验结果相一致，而这些实验结果需要对强度的快速变化进行辨别。因此，不协和对于亥姆霍兹来说变得“不可取”，因为它使耳朵负担过重。相比之下，施图姆普夫的研究从历史给定的音程集合出发，试图找到一个能解释这种选择的原则。他对那些没有音乐和声的有意识知识且无法跟随或再现音乐的实验对象进行的测试，向他揭示了音的统一性和多样性之间的差异。
