Abstract

In Altered Sensations: Rudolph Koenig’s Acoustical Workshop in Nineteenth-Century Paris, David Pantalony achieves the difficult goal of balancing technical detail and historical narrative in his account of Rudolph Koenig and the nineteenth-century Parisian scientific instrument trade. The Parisian instrument making trade, particularly that of acoustical instruments, was at a high point in the mid-nineteenth century. Chief among scientific instrument makers was Rudolph Koenig (1832-1901), whose atelier at 30 Hautefeuille was at once an artisanal studio, a laboratory, a workshop and a showroom. The negotiations necessary for one building, and one person, to channel such different activities is one of the main themes of Pantalony’s book. Pantalony shows that Koenig’s atelier was central to disputes surrounding the creation of the “modern soundscape” (p. 170). Debates regarding analytic versus holistic conceptions of sound, “objective” visual versus “subjective” by-ear modes of perception and measurement, and experimental versus theoretical results are all prominent in the text, and all framed by the different, but not disparate, functions of Koenig’s atelier; the building acts as a multi-faceted lens through which Pantalony considers Koenig and his instruments in their artistic, intellectual, commercial and social contexts