The transformation of acoustics into electro-acoustics, a field at the
intersection of science and technology, guided by electrical
engineering, industry, and the military.
At the end of the nineteenth century, acoustics was a science of musical
sounds; the musically trained ear was the ultimate reference. Just a few
decades into the twentieth century, acoustics had undergone a
transformation from a scientific field based on the understanding of
classical music to one guided by electrical engineering, with industrial
and military applications. In this book, Roland Wittje traces this
transition, from the late nineteenth-century work of Hermann Helmholtz
to the militarized research of World War I and media technology in the
1930s.
Wittje shows that physics in the early twentieth century was not only
about relativity and atomic structure but encompassed a range of
experimental, applied, and industrial research fields. The emergence of
technical acoustics and electroacoustics illustrates a scientific field
at the intersection of science and technology. Wittje starts with
Helmholtz's and Rayleigh's work and its intersection with telegraphy and
early wireless, and continues with the industrialization of acoustics
during World War I, when sound measurement was automated and electrical
engineering and radio took over the concept of noise. Researchers no
longer appealed to the musically trained ear to understand sound but to
the thinking and practices of electrical engineering. Finally, Wittje
covers the demilitarization of acoustics during the Weimar Republic and
its remilitarization at the beginning of the Third Reich. He shows how
technical acoustics fit well with the Nazi dismissal of pure science,
representing everything that "German Physics" under National Socialism
should be: experimental, applied, and relevant to the military.
