The following examples may serve as illustrations. With this in mind, a view of the doctrine of harmonies as a direct continuation of physics seems to be clear. During the 19th century, the piano became the emblem of the sounding body, which could be used both as an instrument of artistic performance and of science. The vibrating piano string not only served scientitsts with a model and metaphor for the description of how the sound-receiving parts of the nervous system worked, it also served, thanks to its apparently simple contruction, as an instrument for the exploration of the machinery of the nervous system. As this example shows, the contexts affiliated with sounding bodies are by no means fixed once and for all.
Music also plays within the narrow confines of the scientific laboratory.
With his investigations on the relation between violin sounds and blood-pressure rhythms in animals and humans during the 1880s, the physiologist Johann Dogiel created a research field that is still actively researched today. Based on modern apparatus, music physiologists search for the neuronal loci responsible for the reception and transformation of musical impressions in the brain and those which record the brain currents of musicians. Mediated by the brain as a sounding body and the apparatus connected to it, sounds produce a special kind of sign and image, which, like the sounds themselves, can be stored in computers. For musicians and physiologists alike it is critical that sounding bodies leave recordable traces. The aim of the colloquium is to articulate via case studies the transfers in both directions between the realm of music, its theory and practice, and of the sciences.