“No Other Art Moves Me as Deeply as Music”: The Anthropology of Sound in Franz Boas

This contribution addresses the anthropology of sound in Franz Boas (Minden, 1858 – New York, 1942), the German Jewish scientist who became the recognized founding father of American anthropology as a discipline. Music and language were two research fields shared by Boas and European scholars, like the philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf and the ethnomusicologist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, directors of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv. They periodically confronted each other with respect to their pioneering research work, which opened the field of ethnomusicology, at the time still 8 defined as vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (comparative musicology). Together with Stumpf and von Hornbostel, Boas supported the importance of an analysis in situ of musical material, phonograph recording and the consequent creation of sound archives, in which these scholars concentrated their lifelong scientific concern. This is particularly noticeable in Boasian painstaking research devoted to the Native Indian and Arctic languages and sounds, where his fieldwork was marked by a systematic attempt to approach foreign sound system with an inductive method ensuring the correctness of transcribing and spelling. As the contribution aims to demonstrate, Boasian German psychophysical training and framework led him to deal rigorously with the phenomena of mishearing, the problem of sound- blindness and the biasing filter on the perception of sounds. More specifically, by underscoring the apperception of a new sound stimuli through similar, already known sounds. Boas would endorse a relativistic approach to perception and mental representations of sounds, fostering his eventual lifelong, hectic concern about an antiracist theory of human mental functions. Following a biographical contextualisation, the above mentioned historical and methodological issues can therefore be evinced by enlightening the role of Boasian contribution in the realms both of the scientific methodology – ingrained in his early psychophysics training – and of the anthropological fieldwork. At stake are Boasian empirical research, intertwoven with philosophical and psychophysical assumptions that offer a historical and epistemological perspective to the history of psychoacoustics, ethnomusicology and anthropology.