The Automaton Ear, and Other Sketches

Excerpt: 'The day was hardly different from many another day, though I will likely recall it even when the mist of years has shrouded the past in an undefined hueless cloud. The sunshine came in at my open window. Out of doors it flooded all the land in its warm summer light—the spires of the town and the bare college campus; farther, the tall bearded barley and rustling oats; farther still, the wild grass and the forest, where the river ran and the blue haze dipped from the sky. The temptation was greater than I could stand, and taking my book I shut up the “study, as the students called my small apartment, leaving it for one bounded by no walls or ceiling. The woods rang with the hum and chirp of insects and birds. I threw myself down beneath a tall, broad-spreading tree. Against its moss-covered trunk I could hear the loud tap of the woodpecker secreted high up among its leaves, and off at the end of a tender young twig a robin trilled, swinging himself to and fro through the checkered sunlight. I never grew weary listening to the changeful voice of the forest and the river, and was hardly conscious of reading until I came upon this paragraph:— “As a particle of the atmosphere is never lost, so sound is never lost. A strain of music or a simple tone will vibrate in the air forever and ever, decreasing according to a fixed ratio. The diffusion of the agitation extends in all directions, like the waves in a pool, but the ear is unable to detect it beyond a certain point. It is well known that some individuals can distinguish sounds which to others under precisely similar circumstances are wholly lost. Thus the fault is not in the sound itself, but in our organ of hearing, and a tone once in existence is always in existence. This was nothing new to me. I had read it before, though I had never thought of it particularly; but while I listened to the robin, it seemed singular to know that all the sounds ever uttered, ever born, were floating in the air now—all music, every tone, every bird-song—and we, alas! could not hear them. Suddenly a strange idea shot through my brain—Why not? Ay, why not hear? Men had constructed instruments which could magnify to the eye and—was it possible?—Why not?'