Hearing the Field 203
The very first words spoken through Faraday brought forward elements that became
particularly important in his subsequent work. Wheatstone began the text of their joint
address by noting that an elastic body “ may be made to assume a vibratory state ” either
“ immediately, by any momentary impulse, ” which alters the natural position of its parti-
cles, allowing them afterward to return to their former state; secondarily, another sounding
body may cause it to “ reciprocate ” via resonance. His historical overview goes back to
Bacon ’ s “ experiments of sympathy, ” to Galileo making a pendulum move by “ the least
breath of the mouth ” repeated at the resonant frequency, to Newton ’ s comparison between
a shining body ’ s component colors and “ the several pipes of an organ inspired all at once. ”
Wheatstone notes that these sympathetic phenomena exhibit the classic Pythagorean ratios,
which Faraday demonstrated by a Javanese musical instrument, a g é nder , whose tuned
bamboo columns resonate vibrating plates ( figure 13.5a ). This exotic instrument had the
aura of far-flung British colonial exploits; Faraday borrowed it from Lady Sophia Raffles,
wife of the colonial governor in service of the East India Company.^19 But Wheatstone ’ s
purpose in using it went beyond mere exoticism and colonial display; he emphasized that
no European instrument had yet used resonant columns of air to augment the intensity of
sounds as did the g é nder , along with other Asiatic and African musical instruments. Thus,
non-European musical traditions that had previously been treated condescendingly here
taught techniques and designs from which European science and music might profit.
Wheatstone used the g é nder to show how resonances may occur at different frequencies
than the original sound. To demonstrate this, he sounded a tuning fork next to a tube with
a sliding piston, noting the resonance of the air column “ when the number of its own
vibrations are any multiple of those of the original sounding body , ” but not the nonexistent
undertones Euler had hypothesized.^20 Wheatstone uses these multiple resonances to explain
the sound production of the humble guimbarde (sometimes called “ jew ’ s harp, ” though
lacking any substantive connection to the Jewish people), a folk instrument of Asiatic
origin ( figure 13.5b ). Here, the vibrating body is the steel tongue in the middle of a metal
frame, which is held against parted front teeth, so that one ’ s mouth becomes the resonating
cavity, alterable in shape through changing the positions of tongue and lips. By considering
the various resonances, Wheatstone explained how this simple instrument, seemingly
restricted to the one fundamental frequency of its steel tongue, can produce a scale.
One imagines Faraday quite challenged to demonstrate these effects himself, serving as
a human resonator for the guimbarde ’ s metal tongue. Surely Faraday could not have
managed the virtuosity Wheatstone ascribed to a certain Mr. E ü lenstein, who used sixteen
guimbardes “ to modulate through every key, and to produce effects truly original and of
extreme beauty. ”^21 Instead, Wheatstone had Faraday sound the instrument over resonators
with movable pistons, thus achieving the scale formerly reserved to the virtuosic mouth.
Such a setup could also duplicate Mr. E ü lenstein ’ s feat of sounding a major triad using
three instruments simultaneously over a suitably chosen resonating tube. On a subsequent
Wheatstone – Faraday lecture, a Mr. Mannin rounded out the evening by performing “ some