Etudes Epistémè: Noise and Sound in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Résumé En

This collection of essays by an international team of authors aims at investigating the interrelation of noise and sound in philosophical theory, in music and in literature. While the state of science in the Enlightenment made it difficult to describe noises or sounds in a mathematically accurate fashion, that is to say, to gain much knowledge of acoustics, the senses, which enabled perception, were objects of philosophical inquiry. Francis Bacon’s inductive method for the new science found philosophical expression in John Locke’s empiricist epistemology such as expounded in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). In this work, Locke took most of his examples from visual perceptions. Similarly, in the field of aesthetics, theory elaborated considerably on Horace’s Ut pictura poesis and, when reflection broadened, in works on the Sister Arts, conceptualisation was either Aristotelian – analysing the arts in terms of mimesis – or tried to distance itself from Aristotle by relativising the importance of imitation in the arts. Be that as it may, the key sense remained sight. The idea of taste was central to the construction of a modern aesthetics, but mainly in its metaphorical sense, the physical sense of taste not being much investigated as such. The traditional hierarchy of the senses was not challenged either by the vogue for Sensibility in the second half of the eighteenth century, a vogue which increased interest in the workings of the nervous system.