187 SVEN HROAR KLEMPE has been Associate Professor of Psychology since 1999 at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. Earlier he was a full professor in mu- sicology, but he has also been associate professor in media studies. The research has been interdisciplinary, though concentrated on communication and fundamental philosophical aspects of acquiring scientific knowledge. In recent years he has focused very much on the history of psychology in early modernity. He has published several books, mainly in Norwegian. THE ROLE OF TONE SENSATION AND MUSICAL STIMULI IN EARLY EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY SVEN HROAR KLEMPE In this article, the role of music in early experimental psychology is examined. Initially, the research of Wilhelm Wundt is considered, as tone sensation and musical elements appear as dominant factors in much of his work. It is hypothesized that this approach was moti- vated by an understanding of psychology that dates back to Christian Wolff’s focus on sen- sation in his empirical psychology of 1732. Wolff, however, had built his systematization of psychology on Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, who combined perception with mathemat- ics, and referred to music as the area in which sensation is united with numerical exactitude. Immanuel Kant refused to accept empirical psychology as a science, whereas Johann Friedrich Herbart reintroduced the scientific basis of empirical psychology by, among other things, referring to music. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. INTRODUCTION In discussions concerning the early days of experimental psychology, tones and music are seldom mentioned. Nevertheless, by taking a closer look at the body of Wilhelm Wundt’s work, elements of music appear as an important factor in a considerable number of his exper- iments. A close affinity between music and psychology has also been documented by the pio- neers of German Gestalt psychology (Ash, 1998). Max Wertheimer refers to Christian von Ehrenfels’ argument of musical transposition being most important in saying that Gestalt is a factor in perception (Wertheimer, 1967). If we change the key of a melody, all the elements are replaced. The only way that we still recognize the melody is not because of the sum of the elements but by the totality of the relationship between them. This totality is an additional fac- tor in forming the Gestalt (Ehrenfels, 1890/1988). This was an important argument for Ehrenfels, emphasized by the fact that he repeated it as one of the very last things he dictated to his wife some weeks before he died (Ehrenfels, 1932/1988). Thus, one may say that throughout history, music and psychology have had a much closer connection than seems to be the case today. Köhler, Koffka, and Wertheimer, as well as Ehrenfels, were all very well educated amateur musicians. In that sense they had a personal interest in music, which may explain some aspects of their references to it. Nevertheless, they were not alone in regard to this focus on music, with Carl Stumpf perhaps being the best example. With the two volumes of Tonpsychologie, 1883 and 1890, his work represented a milestone in both psychology and musicology. In psychology, he introduced relation as an important factor (Ash, 1998), and in musicology, he solved the prob- lematic distinction between consonance and dissonance by introducing the term Sonanzgrade (Dahlhaus, 1989). Even the huge controversy between Stumpf and Wundt in the 1890s pertained to music. It was first of all a methodological dispute, involving several questions, one of which Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 47(2), 187–199 Spring 2011 View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.20495 © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.