Our panel is concerned with the interrelations of technical, musical, and emotional theories and practices in the decades around the year 1800 in Europe. We situate artifacts and machines at the center of our respective analyses of the German Enlightenment, modern musical and literary aesthetics, and the French Industrialization, and we investigate cultural and technical theories and practices as they coalesce around these machines, focusing in particular on the entanglement of artificiality, machine-ness, and feelings.

Adelheid Voskuhl’s case deals with two android automata from the 1770s and 1780s that both display music-playing women. She identifies the automata’s mechanical motions as replicating musical and bodily practices that were a crucial part of the sentimental culture surrounding the emergence and establishing of civil society on the European continent. On the basis of analyses of artifacts and texts, she demonstrates how uncertainties over realness, falsity, and artificiality materialized at the time both around the human-machine-boundary and around novel sentimental practices in a novel social order.

John Tresch is also concerned with the relationship between machines and feelings, his case being situated in the French Industrialization. He analyzes the Saint-Simonian engineers’ industrial projects from the 1830s in relation to the metaphors they used to articulate their vision of a universe that was made up of energetic fluids. Finding one of these fluids to be love, he contextualizes this phenomenon into a larger analysis of an industrial system that was imagined to be held together by passion and affect.

Emily Dolan investigates artificiality and realness on the basis of the relationship between “natural music” and “musical technology” as they were being discussed in musical practice and aesthetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She traces the search for a device that would produce an indefinitely lasting voice-like tone, and its effects and affects on mainstream music of the period, on the basis of texts that deal with questions of musical aesthetics as well as with questions of contemporary machine intelligence.

Our aim for this panel is twofold. On the one hand, we want to explore how technical histories coincide with cultural histories and the types of sources, interpretations, and historiographic sensibilities necessary to understand appropriately these coincidences. Our papers identify underlying connections in fields that are otherwise divided along traditional disciplinary boundaries, and we want to do probe how historiographies usually associated with the history of technology of the last decades mesh with, enrich, and are enriched by, historiographies from cultural and intellectual history and music. We are, on the other hand, interested in the specifics of the period often referred to as “around 1800.” All our papers deal with characteristics of this time of profound social and technical change, and we seek to understand historically the place of pre-industrial and industrial technology in it.

Names and paper title of the presenters:

Emily Dolan: “Forging the Infinite Melody: Hoffmann and the Technology of the Perfect Sound”
John Tresch: “Love and Industry: Saint-Simonian Technotheology”
Adelheid Voskuhl: “Mechanical Musicians and the Human-Machine Boundary in the Sentimental Culture of Eighteenth-century Europe”

Commentator: Langdon Winner