Rudolph Koenig’s Workshop of Sound: Instruments, Theories, and the Debate over Combination Tones

Abstract

Rudolph Koenig's workshop was a busy meeting place for instruments, ideas, experiments, demonstrations, craft traditions, and business. Starting around 1860, it was also the place in Paris where people discovered the new science of sound emerging from the studies of Hermann von Helmholtz in Germany. Koenig built Helmholtz's ideas into apparatus, created new instruments, and spread them throughout the scientific and musical world. Through his own research, he also became Helmholtz's strongest critic. This paper looks at the activities of this unique space and, in particular, how it contributed to the protracted disputes over an elusive acoustical phenomenon called the combination tone.