Tone Psychology: Volume I

The Sensation of Successive Single Tones

Carl Stumpf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317009931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Carl Stumpf (1848-1936) was a German philosopher and psychologist and a visionary and important academic. During his lifetime, he ranked among the most prominent scientists of his time. Stumpf's intention, as evident in his book, Tone Psychology, was to investigate the phenomenon of tone sensation in order to understand the general psychic functions and processes underlying the perception of sound and music. It could be argued that modern music psychology has lost or perhaps ignored the epistemological basis that Carl Stumpf developed in his Tone Psychology. To gain a confident psychological basis, the relevance of Stumpf's deliberations on music psychology cannot be overestimated. Analyses of the essence of tones, complex tones and sounds are fundamental topics for general psychology and epistemology. By the end of this two-volume work, Stumpf had established an epistemology of hearing.

The subject of Volume I is the sensation of successive single tones. Stumpf demonstrates that analysis leads to the realisation of a plurality (is there only one tone or are there several tones?), which is then followed by a comparison: an increase may be observed (one tone is higher than the other) or a similarity may be realised (both tones have the same pitch or the same loudness). With almost mathematical stringency, Stumpf developed a topology of tones. Volume II deals with the sensation of two simultaneous tones (musical intervals). The books are stimulating, rewarding and provocative and will appeal to music psychologists, music theorists, general psychologists, philosophers, epistemologists and neuroscientists.

Foreword to Carl Stumpf’s Tone Psychology, Volume I

“The science must take a much higher place both in academic and in popular estimation if we are to emulate the Germans in work of this kind and keep our old place in the van of the psychological army.”

—James Sully on Stumpf’s Tone Psychology, Volume I (Sully 1884: 594)

“You have done a monumental piece of work, which will be a model to all time of the way in which general views and the minute study of details can be combined.”

—William James on Stumpf’s Tone Psychology, Volume II (letter from James to Stumpf, September 1891; cf. Sprung 2006: 198)

1. Prelude

Carl Stumpf (1848–1936) is regarded as one of the most eminent pioneers of German psychology; he was also decisively involved in the foundation of music psychology and ethnology. Stumpf made his name as founder of the Berlin Psychological Institute within what was then Friedrich Wilhelm University (now Humboldt University) and was adopted within the history of science as the spiritual father of Gestalt psychology. But Stumpf was also a philosopher with a broad interdisciplinary background and a particular conception of phenomenology. He distinguished himself as an author through the two volumes of Tone Psychology (1883, 1890) and numerous articles on the topic, as well as publications in epistemology and the philosophy of science (1891, 1907a, 1907b). His two-volume Erkenntnislehre (1939, 1940) appeared posthumously during the Second World War, and summarised his research into phenomenology. Reactions to the work emerged only sparsely amid the turmoil of war, and after the war it faded into obscurity. Hence Stumpf’s contribution to the philosophy of science and its enduring topicality are yet to be discovered.

The initiative by Reinhard Kopiez and John Sloboda to translate Tone Psychology into English has been greeted with great joy. The merit is all the greater as Stumpf’s tone and music psychology is not appreciated philosophically due to a certain inaccessibility of music and music psychology. In 2010 a Carl Stumpf society was established with the purpose of making accessible Stumpf’s central ideas concerning philosophy and phenomenology, as well as psychology and music psychology. In 2011, a new edition of Erkenntnislehre was released.

In 2014, the correspondence (provisionally complete) between Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf appeared as a book; extending from 1867 until Brentano’s death, it provides information about the multifaceted history of science, but also sheds light on the hitherto unknown crisis-laden personal relationship (edited and introduced by Kaiser-El-Safti). The principal cause of conflict in the letters amounts to Stumpf distancing himself early on from Brentano’s metaphysics (theism and creationism), and Brentano fighting against the wide-ranging significance Stumpf attributed to hearing and to music. Only in this century does there appear to be revived interest in Stumpf across Europe (cf. Besoli & Martinelli 2001; Moro 2012; Fisette 2006; Fisette & Martinelli 2015). The catastrophes of the World Wars can be seen as a principal reason that not only work such as Tone Psychology and Erkenntnislehre, but the entire epoch of German descriptive and innovative research into sense psychology, psychoacoustics and music aesthetics during the 19th century and first third of the 20th disappeared from historical memory. As a result of fatal political events, Stumpf’s phenomenology could not manage the transatlantic crossing at that time.¹

Stumpf, along with Franz Brentano (1838–1917) and Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), was one of the three initiators of the “phenomenological movement”, whose impact unfurled in the last third of the 19th century through Brentano’s epochal work, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874; translated in Brentano 1995). What was new in this philosophical orientation? It sought to replace German idealist philosophy with a doctrine that – against the speculative philosophy of origins – wanted to gain fundamentals of knowledge drawn from inner and outer experience, and to redefine itself against the shortcomings of British empiricism, regarded as controversial in German philosophy. Instead of the leading subject-object dichotomy of Transcendental Philosophy, Brentano advocated an alternative model of knowledge that made the unity of consciousness a prerequisite; this was necessary to analyse the knowledge (Erkenntnis) of foundational intentional mental acts. However, “unity” does not mean “simplicity”, but rather coherence in the sense of homogeneity. Methodologically, Brentano placed emphasis on logical analysis, deduction and induction, introspection and descriptive psychology; where necessary, an experiment ought to be used.

Immanuel Kant’s conception of a transcendental subject of knowledge (Erkenntnissubjekt) divides knowledge into that of passive sensory perception preceded by spontaneous mental activity and empirical knowledge that is superordinated synthetically, from which arose a two-world theory, resulting in a gap between theoretical and practical reason, respectively, between science and the humanities. During the 19th century when the fundamental principles and methods of scientific research in particular were radically transformed, a growing potential arose for conflict between philosophy and the individual sciences, to which Brentano responded with a new understanding of philosophy. According to Stumpf, it was Brentano’s fourth habilitation thesis that sparked his interest in philosophy: “the true methods of philosophy are none other than those of natural science” (Brentano 1968: 137). For Stumpf this amounted to “a new, incomparably deeper and more serious conception of philosophy” (Stumpf in Kraus 1919: 88). At the time, however, there was no consensus within the “phenomenological movement” about this conception, which implied no concession to “naturalism,” of course, and focused on the unity of human cognitive faculty.²

In the course of the following decades the epistemic goal of phenomenology changed: Brentano returned to metaphysical-theological questions, and Husserl drew near to Kant again with the concept of a transcendental phenomenology.³

But must we reach back so far thematically to discuss the intention and meaning of Stumpf’s Tone Psychology? Yes, we must, for on the one hand music plays no role at all within the “phenomenological movement” and identified Stumpf as a philosophical maverick, a “white raven” (Stumpf 1924); on the other hand, he linked Tone Psychology with extensive phenomenological intentions in line with his understanding of phenomenology, which he declared a pre-science (Vorwissenschaft) (propadeutics) for science and the humanities (Stumpf 1907b: 26 f.). Incidentally, Stumpf already had important precursors like Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), Hermann Lotze (1817–1881), and Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894). And already in the 19th century there was a German period of intensive research into the topic of music, one with which Stumpf aligned himself. The following section introduces the phenomenological principles of Tone Psychology.

2. Epistemic positioning of Tone Psychology in Stumpf’s oeuvre

Stumpf linked Tone Psychology with intentions both of a philosophical nature and pertaining to the theory of science, including epistemological subjects that point far beyond the realms of psychoacoustics, music psychology, and music aesthetics. Despite their seemingly elementary character, these intentions touch not on marginal musical details but plumb the depths of fundamental questions in epistemology. While music’s mathematical, formal, and speculative foundations as well as its ethical power belonged to the canon of fundamental philosophical questions in Greek philosophy, this interest was lost in later centuries. In his review of the arts, Kant assigned music the lowest rank because, according to his conception, as a purely “transitory” phenomenon it only excites the senses and the body, but neither gives anything to contemplate nor contributes anything for cultivation (Kant 1890/1968: §53; cf. Kaiser-el-Safti 2009b). Against this philosophical shift in music’s appreciation there arose resistance and opposition to Kant in 19th-century Germany, emanating from Herbart, who also influenced Stumpf’s understanding of phenomenology.⁴

The two-volume Tone Psychology approaches diverse structural and functional foundations of Stumpf’s conception of music as well as elementary physiological, psychological, and epistemic conditions and concomitant phenomena of hearing. Stumpf attributes to hearing a cardinal significance for the formation of individual consciousness and the intersubjective development of culture; by contrast, vision is generally recognised in philosophy and science as the more important sense, that which genuinely shapes consciousness.⁵

Tone Psychology should not be misconstrued as the work of a philosopher who converted his private passion for music into scientific engagement. Admittedly, Stumpf began making music as a very talented child, played various instruments and even composed (Stumpf 1924/2012), but the decision to study philosophy initially led him away from a preoccupation with music, and when he turned back to it, work on the fundamental principles of music had transformed the position of a music lover into that of a researcher. Since the 1870s the young Stumpf affiliated himself with the trend of obtaining fundamental principles for an empirically grounded epistemology from differences of the senses. He reported the research over the ensuing decades with innovative theoretical contributions and detailed work of an enormously descriptive and experimental nature. With phenomenology he provided experimental research on perception, but also fundamental principles of a systematically worked-through and philosophical nature.

In 1873 Stumpf distinguished himself with his first phenomenological work, On the Psychological Origins of Spatial Perception, and in 1875 he began experimental preparatory work for Tone Psychology. What followed initially responded to the basic principles of the monograph on spatial perception. Like many researchers of perception of his time, Stumpf was interested in the difference between the two “higher” senses because he sought to achieve from their different structure information about an empirically applicable concept of the soul, an extended concept of science, and new routes to aesthetic questions. The philosophical grounds for interest in sensory differences and sensory perception are as good as forgotten today, though they fundamentally affect another theme that was virulent at the time – the problem of so-called qualia. The philosopher John Locke first broached the topic in the 17th century when he labelled features of sensory perception such as extent, shape, density – that is, calculable and objective attributes – as primary qualities of sensory perception because, despite being unending by nature, they were measurable and suitable for science.⁶ From these, Locke distinguished secondary qualities, colour and tone for instance, which we supposedly know only through our subjective sensations, and which ought to have no importance for science (Locke 1981, vol. 1, bk 2, ch. 8). Locke’s immediate successors in philosophy, George Berkeley and David Hume, contradicted this division because so-called primary qualities could never appear in one’s perception without the secondary qualities: extension (space) that is not filled with data of colour or touch simply cannot be perceived and thus could not be abstracted as a concept and used for science.⁷

With its broad theoretical examination, Stumpf’s monograph attests to his nativist and/or empiricist principles, such as the intensity and interdisciplinarity of the discussion concerning the problem of spatial perception and conception, because here a fundamental epistemological problem needed clarification. The discussion about the inadequacies of Locke’s theory got going quickly indeed, and has yet to find a resolution. Today we complain that the theory of primary and secondary qualities causes confusion, particularly in brain sciences, that it engenders category mistakes because this theory would have “dramatically” split the cognitive faculty (Bennett & Hacker 2003: 112, 128–129, 289).

A prompt from David Hume was important in the context of Stumpf’s Tone Psychology; he first suggested a new classification of sensory phenomena as such, which characterises the visual and tactile senses as having extent, spreading themselves over a surface, occupying a place. That should not apply to another class of sensory phenomena, that of tones and sounds, which Hume labelled as “without any place” and – importantly for a theory of mental activity – placed them on a par with mental phenomena. A thought or wish, like a tone or sound, occupies no place; neither thoughts and wishes nor tones are locatable as such (their source of stimulus) or dividable (Hume 1985: 111–112, 280–298). On the one hand, Hume implies that even tones and sounds help us to form ideal models (l.c. 97), namely to attain pure musical intervals through fancy and a consummate imagination, that is, by means of experience; on the other hand, Hume draws radically negat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword to Carl Stumpf’s Tone Psychology, Volume I
• Translator’s introduction
• Preface
• Tonal table
• Part I Tonal judgements
• Selective bibliography of works cited by Stumpf
• Additional literature (including English translations)
• Index