I have to say that, while I occasionally found Sir James Jeans’s Science & Music intriguing in the conceptual connections which it drew between scientific findings and musicality, I did not really enjoy his analysis and interpretation of  these findings. His discussion of evolution, while interesting in many ways, fell short of meaningfulness for me because of its decisively quantitative approach to tracing the creation of our contemporary aural faculties. I did find his points on our awareness of our own modes of hearing (Michel Chion being a pioneer in this field) to be much more elucidating of overarching and applicable concepts. At one point, Jeans declares, “we obtain more pleasure through our eyes than through our ears,” which seems, to me, to be a bold claim made with very little evidence to back it up. If he was to propose that there were a neurological proof to such an assertion, I would find it more compelling, but it seemed to me that he was just spurting out subjective opinion as some sort of universal truth. I often feel that I would lose just as much, if not more pleasure in the loss of my hearing than I would in the loss of my eyesight (although, to be fair, my eyesight is already imperfect, and so I have a very real sense of how that feels, and am more comfortable with it).

The approach that this author takes is, in and of itself, too literal and scientific for me to personally engage and connect with. Song and music is an artistic realm, in my humble student opinion, and while I agree that connections can and should be drawn between the fundaments of the arts and the sciences, approaching either realm with the methodology of the other seems to be quite a mistake. I appreciate what Sir James Jeans is attempting to convey here, but believe that he also belies his own certain biases in his writing, and does not maintain a perspective which I find holistically convincing. Regardless, though, the scientific phenomena which he describes are extremely interesting to consider when we analyze our reactions and appreciation toward certain types of music and song.