4 Sounding Nerves: The Transmission of Information in Neurological Research

As in art, possibilities for representation in science have been, and continue to be, permanently influenced by technological developments. For sonification, an important role was played by the invention of the telephone and the phonograph, which ushered in the first era of sonification,^[9] as it now became possible to record and reproduce sounds as well as play them back elsewhere. A few years after Alexander Graham Bell registered his patent for the telephone in 1876, the first publications appeared dealing with applications in which the telephone or its loudspeaker are used to acoustically display physiological phenomena.^[10]In a medical experiment by Nikolai Wedenskii, the signals emitted by open, dissected nerves were acoustically amplified. What is remarkable about Wedenskii’s work is his precise description of the sounds he perceived, which became the basis for the scientific discussion of the characteristics of nerve cells.

In the early 20th century, neurologist and psychologist Hans Berger conducted experiments in the cortex of the brain as part of his efforts to use technology to objectively prove the relationship between the body and the soul. While his experiments initially involved dogs and cats, in 1924 he began experimenting on humans. He succeeded in registering electrical activity in the cerebral cortex, which marked the introduction of the electroencephalogram (EEG). His work initially went unnoticed. The neurophysiologist Edgar Douglas Adrian was the first to acknowledge his achievement and named the brain’s resting state after him: the Berger rhythm, which can be made audible as a dense murmur that contains noise.^[11] In his work on the Berger rhythm, Adrian developed the first acoustic representation of the EEG, in which electrodes and amplifiers made it possible to experience processes that had hitherto not been audible.^[12].

From a historical perspective, this can be regarded as a technologically enhanced form of auscultation.