29 April 2025 | 2:00-4:00pm on Zoom &
in Lecture Room 1, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge
Jacob Olley (University of Cambridge)
Salih Bey’s Sonometer: Acoustics and Revolution in Late Ottoman Istanbul
The study of acoustics has been the subject of groundbreaking research in recent years by scholars working at the intersections between musicology, sound studies, history of science, and media theory (e.g. Gribenksi 2023; Tkaczyk 2023; Hui 2012; Steege 2012). However, although some research has taken account of the global technological and colonial networks that shaped concepts and practices of acoustics (e.g. McMurray and Mukhopadhyay 2024), there has been little investigation of how these scientific developments were perceived and adapted by non-Western intellectuals and musicians. In this talk, I will discuss the intellectual and political ramifications of debates about acoustics in the late Ottoman Empire. I will focus in particular on the publications of the physicist and mathematician Salih Zeki (1864–1921) and his attempts to measure the pitches of Ottoman music using instruments such as the sonometer. As I will show, Salih’s experiments in acoustics should be understood in the context of his position as the director of the Imperial Meteorological Observatory and his efforts to integrate the Ottoman Empire into international systems of time and space measurement. Furthermore, Salih’s activities and ideas reflect the philosophical movement towards materialism which was the defining ideological force of the Young Turk revolution. The talk will thus situate the history of acoustics and music theory in relation to the diverse intellectual and political movements that led to the recalibration of the global order in the decades around 1900.
Jacob Olley is a Research Associate on the ERC/UKRI project Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789–1922 at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Music at Cambridge, and Research Associate on the DFG project Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae: Critical Editions of Near Eastern Music Mansucripts at the University of Münster. His publications include a two-volume critical edition of an early nineteenth-century manuscript collection of Ottoman music and the co-edited volume Rhythmic Cycles and Structures in the Art Music of the Middle East (2017). His article “Evliya’s Song: Listening to the Early Modern Ottoman Court” (2023) won the American Musicological Society Alfred Einstein Award, the British Forum for Ethnomusicology Early Career Prize, and an honourable mention for the Royal Musical Association Jerome Roche Prize. He is currently working on a monograph titled Transcribing Empire: Musical Literacies and the Armenian Enlightenment in Late Ottoman Istanbul.
Ottoman Auralities 