Peter Pesic "Sounding Bodies: Music and the Making of Biomedical Science"
HARVARD SCIENCE BOOK TALK
Peter Pesic, in conversation with Logan McCarty
"Sounding Bodies: Music and the Making of Biomedical Science"
Beginning in ancient Greece, Peter Pesic writes, music and sound significantly affected the development of the biomedical sciences. Physicians used rhythmical ratios to interpret the pulse, which inspired later efforts to record the pulse in musical notation. After 1700, biology and medicine took a “sonic turn,” viewing the body as a musical instrument, the rhythms and vibrations of which could guide therapeutic insight. In Sounding Bodies, Pesic traces the unfolding influence of music and sound on the fundamental structure of the biomedical sciences.
Pesic explains that music and sound provided the life sciences important tools for hearing, understanding, and influencing the rhythms of life. As medicine sought to go beyond the visible manifestations of illness, sound offered ways to access the hidden interiority of body and mind. Sonic interventions addressed the search for a new typology of mental illness, and practitioners used musical instruments to induce hypnotic states meant to cure both psychic and physical ailments. The study of bat echolocation led to the manifold clinical applications of ultrasound; such sonic devices as telephones and tuning forks were used to explore the functioning of the nerves.
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Peter Pesic's seven books consider questions in the history and philosophy of science, music, and ideas. His new book Sounding Bodies: Music and the Making of Biomedical Science is the youngest sibling to his earlier Music and the Making of Modern Science and Polyphonic Minds. On the faculty of St. John's College in Santa Fe since 1980, he has been deeply involved in its unified curriculum based on close study and discussion of great works, especially in shaping its unique program of study in laboratory science, mathematics, and music. He is director of its Science Institute (which offers week-long intensive seminars on important texts in science and mathematics) and is an Associate of the Department of Physics at Harvard University.
Logan McCarty is Asst. Dean of Science Undergraduate Education, Lecturer on Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Lecturer on Physics at Harvard University. He received undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in Chemistry from Harvard, where he studied contact electrification of organic polymers (what most people would call “static electricity”). He now directs Harvard’s Science Education Research Lab, which seeks to improve teaching and learning in undergraduate science education. He has taught organic chemistry at Harvard for over 25 years, and also teaches physical chemistry, physics, and applied mathematics. With colleagues from the biology and physics departments, Dr. McCarty created and co-teaches a Harvard General Education course entitled, “What is Life? From Quarks to Consciousness.”
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