I want my creations to lie along the line that bridges artist and scientist. I think there is beauty in the construction of things, beauty in precision and in things that work. This notion is held by the scientific creations of the 1800s and early 1900s, where scientific objects were treated as both tools to understand the world around us and also items to entertain viewers as well to help visualise and demonstrate the inherent beauty in natural processes that occur. Currently reading a borrowed book called ‘Instruments and the Imagination’ by Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman, on loan to me from Milo/the sound arts office informal library. It details a variety of instruments from the 1700s to the 1900s, through which an account of the altering perspectives on science is illustrated. Romantic devices such as the Aeolian Harp capture my attention greatly; this stringed instrument is played by the wind, left on an open window so that one can listen to the music of nature. This mysterious instrument was reported to not play the open notes to which the strings were tuned (the fundamental frequencies) but to generate other tones, at first harmonious and pleasant but if the wind picked up it was capable of producing eerie screeching tones and dissonant wails. “Nothing could better match the sentiment of the romantic soul” write Hankins and Silverman. This instrument, it turns out, was playing the harmonics of the strings which was a result of the manner in which these strings were excited, but the exact mechanics behind this weren’t understood until 1878. In this year, V. Strouhal makes a guess that these strings sound the ‘frictional tones’ rather than the fundamental because of the entirely different way in which they are excited: he proposed that turbulent air behind the string was the culprit for generating these eerie overtones, and he was spot on. This was later identified as the Kármán vortex street effect, seen below. The inclusion of this instrument within the book lends a glimpse into the overlap between science and the arts in that era, which is something that I feel I want to explore within my creations.