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Roger Winfield: “Windsong 2”

From the album Windsongs: The Sound of Aeolian Harps (1991)

Although the underlying acoustic principle is an ancient one, the first detailed description of a human-built Aeolian harp (also known as the wind harp) comes from the 1650 compendium Musurgia Universalis of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. The instrument, which appears under the heading “Machinamentum X,” is featured in a series of fantastic devices for making music without human intervention.

Kircher often gets credit for introducing the wind harp into European letters, but the instrument was mentioned briefly in the Magia Naturalis of the Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta, published in 1588. As R. Murray Schafer points out, the instrument turns up in various forms in many different world cultures, including a miniature version built into a kite, well-known in China and Java.

The Aeolian harp gained new life in the late 18th and early 19th century, when it was hailed by Romantic poets as the transcendent spirit of nature made audible. Coleridge, Keats, and Wordsworth, Goethe and Schiller, and later Emerson and Thoreau all devoted lines to the instrument, which provided for sensitive souls of the time a kind of meandering, ambient music avant la lettre.

A sketch of the instrument from Kircher’s book Phonurgia Nova of 1673

Attentive listeners noticed that the sounds elicited by the wind harp were often strangely dissonant and bore no apparent relationship to the fundamental pitches of the instrument’s strings. These unexpected frequencies confounded acousticians, who concocted a number of theories to explain how such sounds arose from the interaction between the wind and the string.

Only in the late 19th century was a satisfactory explanation attained: the wind passing over the string creates tiny eddies or vortices around the string.  At a sufficient velocity these eddies break off and produce a tone, which may elicit a sympathetic tone in the strings if it corresponds to one of the string’s harmonic frequencies. These “friction tones” were a new acoustic discovery and accounted for the unique sound quality of the Aeolian harp.

This modern example of the sound of an Aeolian Harp is from the 1991 album Windsongs by British musician Roger Winfield, who recorded a variety of harps using magnetic pickups (similar to those found on electric guitars) to amplify the otherwise delicate tones of the harp into something rather more powerful. The recordings were edited after the fact to create musical contrasts, but underwent no substantial processing or effects.

(For more information: The Alsatian composer Georges Kastner wrote a massive study of the instrument in 1856 entitled La Harpe d’Éole: Sur les Rapports des Phénomènes Sonores de la Nature avec la Science et l’Art. The book has unfortunately not been translated. An excellent recent history of the Aeolian harp can be found in the book Instruments and the Imagination by Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman.)

September 02, 2011, 7:41pm

Musica mundana update, June 2010 

Two excellent stories to which I was alerted this morning by NPR, which unfortunately used them as a cutesy segue into a feature on the “real music” of some boring singer/songwriter.

First, physicists at CERN in Geneva are “sonifying” the data from their experiments with the Large Hadron Collider in order to render perceptible these microcosmic interactions— and perhaps, to better understand them.  The project, entited “LHC Sound,” is a collaboration between CERN and a group of physicists, musicians, and artists in London.  Unfortunately, this “particle music” sounds a lot like second-rate computer music circa 1998.  Nonetheless, intriguing work.

The Large Hadron Collider. Is it a coincidence it looks like the Pompidou Center?

Second, scientists at the University of Sheffield in England have recently used satellite images of the vast “coronal loops” shot off by the sun to measure the frequency of their vibrations and transpose the result into the range of human hearing.  The scientists studying these phenomena say that the magnetic disturbances sometimes behave like a plucked guitar string (transverse waves), in other cases like air through a wind instrument (longitudinal waves).  Analysis of the sounds is being used to prepare for an anticipated “space storm” in 2013.

I find it fascinating that virtually all of the “nature music” discovered in recent years— whether microcosmic or macrocosmic— sounds like post-1950 experimental electronica.  Is nature imitating art here, or vice versa?

June 25, 2010, 11:06am