Carl Stumpf Research on Tone Psychology

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, psychologist Carl Stumpf and his colleagues at the Institute of Psychology in Berlin made the phonograph into a research tool for tone psychology, as is documented by a collection of roughly a hundred Experimentalwalzen (experimental cylinders). Today, these cylinders are preserved at the Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin. Digital copies of some of the cylinders are available through our database, accompanied by a selection of Stumpf’s laboratory notebooks, documenting his interest in technologies of sound analysis and synthesis. In addition, the database holds published writings on scientific sound recording by Stumpf and his close collaborators.