HELMHOLTZ, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von.

Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik ...

Brunswick, Friedrich Vieweg and Son, 1863. 8vo, pp. [xi], [1], 600, with numerous wood-engraved illustrations in text; occasional spotting; a good copy in contemporary half calf. FIRST EDITION of Helmholtz's first book, on human sensitivity to tones and sounds. Helmholtz divides the subject into three sections - the first dealing with the composition of soundwaves, the second with consonance and dissonance and the last with relationships between sounds, scales and tonality. Also included is an anatomical treatise on the ear. 'Helmholtz' greatest achievement in physiological acoustics lay in formulating the resonance theory of hearing. Like so much of his physiology, that theory rested upon Johannes Müller's law of specific nerve energies. Müller taught that the nature of the impulse carried to the sensorium by a given nerve is unique and independent of the nature of the external stimulus. Between 1850 and 1855 the microscopic anatomy of the cochlea first became known. Among the structures revealed were the rods of Corti strung out in gradually increasing size along the length of the cochlea - analogous, Helmholtz insisted, to the tuned wires of a piano. In 1857 Helmholtz boldly hypothesized that these rods function as tuned resonators ... [He] incorporated all these results in his great work Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen... in which he applied his discoveries to music theory' DSB.Garrison-Morton 1562; Horblit 49a.

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