CHAPTER 10

Salih Bey’s Sonometer: Synchronizing Audition in Ottoman Istanbul

Jacob Olley

Introduction

Are ways of listening shared across different societies and musical traditions, or are they culturally specific? How are they connected to models and practices of time measurement? What role does attention play in conceptualizations and experiences of sound and temporality? This chapter approaches these questions through a discussion of experimental acoustics in the late Ottoman Empire.1 It focuses on the activities of Salih Zeki Bey (1864–1921), a mathematician, physicist, and historian of science who also published the first substantial works on acoustics in Ottoman Turkish. Beginning in 1898, in collaboration with the musicologist Rauf Yekta (1871–1935), Salih conducted experiments with a differential sonometer to measure the intervals used in Ottoman music. This led to the formulation of a new theory of pitch that combined concepts from early Islamicate music treatises with the principles of modern acoustics, and which is the basis of the standard theory used in Turkish music today.2 In this chapter, I situate Salih’s experiments within the context of his scientific career and contemporary debates about the relationship between Europe and the Ottoman Empire in order to illustrate how developments in music theory and acoustics were connected to broader social, intellectual, and political currents. As I will argue, Salih’s conceptualization of pitch can be fruitfully understood in relation to his efforts, as director of the Imperial Observatory, to implement international standards of time measurement in the Ottoman Empire. In this way, the chapter shows how global experiences of attentive listening were transformed by the adoption of new technologies and models of scientific measurement that traversed multiple domains including music theory, acoustics, and chronometry.

Attentive listening takes different forms and may serve many different purposes. Before the late nineteenth century, the most extensively theorized forms of listening in Ottoman and other Islamicate contexts were those associated with Sufi rituals involving music, vocalization, and movement, generally referred to as samāʿ (audition). Practices of attentive listening were also integral to Ottoman court music, which drew heavily on philosophical and aesthetic elements of Sufism.3 Proper appreciation of such music required close attention to modal (and rhythmic) structures, including nuances of pitch that distinguished one makam from another, demonstrated the skill and knowledge of the performer, and intensified the affective power of a text or composition. In theoretical discourse, the apprehension of musical modes and their correspondences with cosmological and natural phenomena such as planets, humors, and elements was often portrayed as an act of extraordinary auditory perception.4 The notion that attentive listening has an ethical effect and mediates between mundane and supramundane realms was also a key aspect of Quranic recitation, which was institutionalized through the systematic training of reciters and the construction of mosques with highly resonant interiors.5 Furthermore, attending to the call to prayer (which coincided with the stages of the diurnal cycle) constituted the principal means of time reckoning in the Ottoman lands before the mid-nineteenth century, and thus was another way in which the supramundane structures that governed human societies were rendered audible.6

While the forms of auditory attention associated with Sufism, courtly music, Quranic recitation, and the call to prayer should not be regarded as homogenous or unchanging, they do represent a broad set of interrelated and socially structured listening practices that were also the subject of intellectual reflection among Muslim authors. In the long nineteenth century, however, the adoption of modern scientific technologies and concepts in conjunction with a shifting geopolitical relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Europe contributed to the emergence of new practices of listening, which I argue were also entangled with changing understandings of temporality.7 In the context of the acoustic experiments conducted by Salih and his collaborators, the purpose of attentive listening was not to produce a heightened emotional or spiritual state, but to determine the exact frequency of a pitch. Rather than revealing the cosmological or divine basis of the manifest world, the science of acoustics aimed to demonstrate universal principles of sound as a purely material phenomenon by means of standardized technologies and mathematical models. Likewise, the standardization of time involved the adoption of technologies and calculative procedures that desacralized the experience of temporality and reconfigured it as an abstract series of linear points.8

As a variation on the anthropologist Talal Asad’s notion of “calculative reason,” I use the term calculative listening to describe the kinds of auditory attention that are employed in acoustic experiments, and more generally in relation to the perception of sound and time as quantifiable physical phenomena.9 The advent of calculative listening coincided with the adoption of international standards of scientific measurement that were essential to the integration of the Ottoman Empire into global networks of governance, economics, and knowledge. This process can also be described as a form of synchronization, which applied to various domains from telegraphic communication and railway timetables to the homogenization of social practices and aesthetic values (including, for example, perceptions of pitch).10 The advocates of synchronization in the Ottoman Empire—including Salih Zeki—were closely associated with the Young Turk movement, which came to power in the constitutional revolution of 1908 and was driven by a materialist philosophy that promoted belief in the supremacy of modern science.11 The concepts of calculative listening and synchronization thus provide ways to understand the interactions between large-scale geopolitical processes, localized scientific debates and social struggles, and collective practices and subjective experiences of listening.

Yet although there was a general shift in modes of auditory attention in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, this was by no means uncomplicated or uncontested. Salih’s sonometric experiments were intended to provide empirical confirmation of precisely defined intervals in Ottoman music. However, he found that most performers and listeners were dismissive of his calculative methods and continued to use less mathematically exact means of articulating pitch relations. At the same time, Salih argued that the perception of fine distinctions in pitch and the appreciation of their emotional significance depended on culturally specific modes of listening that distinguished Ottoman from European music. Both practically and rhetorically, then, auditory attention could be deployed in diverse and apparently contradictory ways: as a means of calculating exact frequencies or synchronizing experiences of daily time, and thus as a kind of audile technique that was essential to the ideology of scientific progress, but also as an enculturated listening practice that demonstrated the sophistication and subtlety of Ottoman music in contrast to European musical aesthetics. Moreover, forms of auditory attention and temporal consciousness associated with Sufism continued to hold significance for late Ottoman and early Republican intellectuals and were reinvigorated by engagement with contemporary spiritual and philosophical movements, including the thought of Henri Bergson. In the final section of this chapter, I therefore discuss how Sufi and Bergsonian ideas of time and listening were used to conceptualize the heterogenous modes of auditory attention that coexisted in late Ottoman modernity.

An Ottoman Man of Science and Letters

Before discussing Salih Zeki’s interventions in acoustics, an outline of his broader professional and intellectual trajectory can give a sense of the interconnections between scientific, technological, and governmental domains in the late Ottoman Empire.12 Born in Istanbul in 1864, Salih began working in the Science Department of the Ministry of Post and Telegraphy (Posta ve Telgraf Nezareti Fen Kalemi) in 1882. He was sent the following year to study at the École supérieure de Télégraphie in Paris, where he also pursued courses at the École des Ponts et Chaussées and the Collège de France. After returning to Istanbul in 1885, he worked again in the Science Department of the Ministry of Post and Telegraphy while also teaching physics and chemistry at the Imperial School of Administration (Mekteb-i Mülkiye-i Şahane).

In the early 1890s, Salih worked as an assistant to Aristide Coumbary (1828–1896), an Ottoman Greek astronomer who had founded the Imperial Observatory (Rasadhane-i Amire) in 1868.13 The primary purpose of the observatory was to collect meteorological data from areas within or adjacent to the Ottoman Empire, which were transmitted via telegraph to the Paris Observatory, thus helping to maintain a global information network. A further and related function of the observatory was to regulate time measurement, ensuring that the various calendrical and diurnal time systems used in the Ottoman Empire were standardized and synchronized with those used in Europe. This was essential not only for the management of commerce, labor, transport, communication, and administrative schedules, but also for the comprehensive mapping of space through the establishment of precise geographic coordinates, as stipulated by the International Meridian Conference held in Washington, DC in 1884.14

After Coumbary died in 1896, Salih became the director of the observatory and was thus responsible for meteorological data collection and time regulation throughout the empire. In 1908, the Young Turks led a coup that established a new constitutional government led by the Committee of Union and Progress (İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti, CUP). Given his alignment with the philosophical ideals of the Young Turks, this proved favorable for Salih’s career, and over the following years he occupied a series of important posts in education and government. In 1913 Salih was the Ottoman delegate to the second International Time Conference in Paris convened by the International Time Bureau, which had been founded the previous year and was headquartered at the Paris Observatory.15 Although he resigned from the rectorship of Darülfünun (now Istanbul University) in 1917, he continued to teach and serve as dean of the Faculty of Science until his premature death four years later.16

Salih was a prolific author, producing scores of newspaper and journal articles, monographs, textbooks, and translations alongside his official duties.17 At the observatory, Salih compiled almanacs in collaboration with Émile Lacoine (1835–99), a French advisor to the Ministry of Post and Telegraphy who had facilitated his studies in Paris. These provided granular information on lunar and solar cycles, altitudes, longitudes and latitudes, rainfall, air pressure, and temperatures for local and global locations.18 Relatedly, he wrote a number of newspaper articles advocating the reform of timekeeping systems and the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time in the Ottoman Empire.19 Salih published educational and reference works on various areas of science, mathematics, and engineering as well as articles that sought to communicate scientific knowledge and the latest technological discoveries to the reading public. He was actively involved in print journalism, serving as the director of Resimli Gazete and writing regularly for periodicals such as Tanin, which was closely aligned with the CUP. In addition, he published books and articles on the methodology and philosophy of science, mathematics, and logic, including translations and commentaries on works by figures such as Jules Henri Poincaré, George Boole, and August Comte.20

Another important area of Salih’s work was the history of science and mathematics in the Islamicate world, which was typically referred to during this period (by European and Muslim scholars alike) as “the Orient” (şark). In the late 1880s, Salih had begun to study treatises on mathematics and astronomy in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish that were held in Istanbul’s libraries, aiming to understand how the adoption of ancient Greek concepts by Muslim scholars had contributed to the development of mathematical sciences in Europe. At the same time, he read the work of Orientalists and historians of mathematics such as Franz Woepcke, J. H. C. Kern, and Paul Tannery.21 This research provided the basis for articles on the history of the mathematical sciences that were published in both Ottoman and French journals and culminated in a projected four-volume history of mathematics in the Islamicate world, titled Asar-i bakiye (Eternal works, 1911), of which only the first two volumes were published in Salih’s lifetime.22

In sum, then, Salih was a cosmopolitan intellectual who believed in the benefits of modern science and the integration of the Ottoman Empire into the global order. At the same time, he was a fellow traveler of the nationalist movement led by the Young Turks, as well as of the reformist trends that sought to revive early Islamic learning in order to modernize the Muslim world and demonstrate its parity with European civilization. These complexities are representative of many Ottoman intellectuals around the turn of the twentieth century and are essential for understanding Salih’s approach to the science of sound, which wove together several different ideological threads. However, as I will show in the following section, there were diverse views about the nature and practical benefits of acoustics among Ottoman intellectuals and music practitioners, views that intersected with polemical debates about science, universalism, and cultural difference.

Debating the Science of Sound

Salih Zeki’s contributions to the science of sound began with the publication of his textbook Hikmet-i tabiiye (Physics) in 1894. This work included a substantial section on acoustics, explaining basic principles of vibration, frequency, hearing, and resonance, complete with diagrams of instruments such as tuning forks, sirens, and a sonometer.23 In this respect, it was preceded by a number of other generalist physics textbooks, most of which were based on French sources.24 It was not until the appearance of Salih’s Mebhas-i savt (Acoustics) in 1910 that a work devoted exclusively to acoustics was published in Turkish.25 Mebhas-i savt is also notable for its exposition of the Ottoman pitch system and comparison with other tuning systems, which had not been discussed in previous treatises on physics. This was an outcome of the experiments Salih and his collaborators began conducting with the sonometer in the late 1890s, experiments whose implications were vigorously debated in the Ottoman press at the time.

The differential sonometer (Figure 10.1) had been developed in the mid-nineteenth century by Albert Marloye (1795–1874), an early specialist maker of acoustic instruments.26 It comprised a wooden resonator box across which two or more metal strings were mounted, supported by two fixed bridges a meter apart, and whose vibrating length and tension could be adjusted by manipulating sliding bridges, weights, pulleys, and a tuning key. The surface of the resonator box was usually marked with different scale divisions, including the “chromatic tempered scale” and the “chromatic physicists’ scale” (based on harmonic ratios), as well as a meter scale divided into millimeters, though string lengths could also be measured with a beam compass. By adjusting these parameters, it was possible to acoustically compare pitches produced by different string lengths (as well as degrees of tension, string diameter, or density) in relation to different mathematical scales.27 In comparison to other acoustic instruments such as the siren or the tonometer, the sonometer was relatively inexpensive and simple to construct. Although it did not measure frequencies directly, it could be used in conjunction with other instruments such as pitch pipes or tuning forks to provide an accurate indication of pitch. This involved tuning one string of the sonometer to a fixed pitch (e.g., 435 Hertz), which allowed for the calculation of other frequencies with reference to the mathematical scales marked on the body of the instrument.28

In the section on acoustics in Hikmet-i tabiiye, which was based entirely on European sources, Salih had been unable to provide any information about the scientific basis of Ottoman or “Oriental” music, and his curiosity about this topic brought him into contact with Rauf Yekta, today regarded as the founder of modern Turkish music theory. Like Salih, Yekta had been collecting and studying treatises in Arabic and Persian since the 1880s, in his case with the aim of reviving mathematical approaches to pitch and mode that were no longer used or well understood by Ottoman musicians and theorists.29 Yekta’s main teacher and collaborator in this regard was the Mevlevi Sufi sheikh Ataullah Efendi (1842–1910), a highly proficient musical performer who was conversant with older theoretical works and at the same time deeply interested in contemporary scientific and intellectual developments. Yekta had read the section on acoustics in Hikmet-i tabiiye closely, and he and Ataullah both had sonometers built in order to demonstrate the intervals documented in earlier treatises and measure the pitches used in contemporary Ottoman music.30

Based on his historical research and practical experiments with Ataullah, Yekta began publishing articles on Ottoman music theory in periodicals such as Resimli Gazete and İkdam in January 1897, and the following year he personally demonstrated his findings to Salih using the sonometer.31 Yekta’s publications attracted the attention of other musicians and intellectuals, including Ahmed Midhat (1844–1912), perhaps the most influential man of letters of the late Ottoman period. Yekta and Ahmed Midhat had a series of testy exchanges in the press beginning in October 1898, in which Ahmed Midhat argued that there was a single, universal music that had reached the most advanced state in both practice and theory in Europe. By contrast, Yekta maintained that there was an essential difference between Occidental and Oriental music, and that the latter was governed by distinct theoretical rules that had been meticulously formulated by al-Fārābī (d. 950) and other Muslim scholars.32

In response to Yekta’s articles, an unidentified writer using the pseudonym “İsmail” questioned not just the distinction between Eastern and Western music, but the value of applying mathematical models to Ottoman music. In attempting to calculate the number of vibrations in sounds, according to this critic, Yekta and his collaborators were pointlessly “counting hairs on a sheepskin” (“pösteki saymak”) and posing riddles like those that elementary school children ask one another.33 Yekta’s response was dismissively terse, but Salih Zeki was now motivated to intervene.34 In an article published in İkdam on January 7, 1899, Salih stated that he had met Yekta only once, and emphasized that he was not a musician but a scientist with an interest in acoustics. If the current century was the “age of progress” (“asr-ı terakki”), as the critic had asserted, it was necessary to respect the achievements of illustrious scholars such as al-Fārābī and to have a firm grasp of the latest scientific principles. Moreover, the respected European scientists who had carried out acoustic experiments, such as Helmholtz, could hardly be compared to elementary school children.35

Salih went on to explain in more detail the concept of frequency, asserting that it is the only possible means to distinguish between different pitches. Indeed, it was the basis for the advanced development of music theory in Europe, to the extent that the composer had become a kind of “music accountant” (“musiki muhasibi”).36 Yet when Salih had attempted to discuss acoustic principles with practicing Ottoman musicians, his inquiries were often met with incomprehension. Salih reported that he was astonished to meet musicians who, “although they play an instrument superbly, are . . . not convinced that the phenomenon called sound is the result of vibration.”37 Upon hearing that the air column in a pitch pipe tuned to A vibrates 870 times per second (i.e., 435 Hertz), one interlocutor responded: “Be reasonable! Does the air in such a tiny pipe have time to vibrate so many times?”38 According to Salih, whereas in European music the relations between pitches had been accounted for mathematically, the musicians he spoke to confirmed that knowledge of pitch relations in Ottoman music could still be learned only from a master teacher. For these reasons, he was overjoyed to read about the progress of Yekta’s research, which would establish a rational theory for Ottoman music rooted in the principles of acoustics, and thus demonstrate scientifically its differences from European music.39

Yekta responded a few days later to Salih’s article, grateful to have the public support of a respected scientist who understood his methods and goals.40 Ahmed Midhat also responded, expressing admiration for Salih but reiterating his opinion that “what we call Western (alafranga) music is scientific music. What is opposed to that is opposed to science.”41 Over the following weeks a flurry of articles by Salih, Ahmed Midhat, Yekta, and others appeared in the Ottoman press, addressing a range of questions connected to acoustics, music theory, science, aesthetics, cultural difference, and modes of listening. Salih announced that he was now engaged in further experiments with the sonometer in collaboration with Yekta and other musically knowledgeable people.42 Like Yekta, he invoked the authority of European musicologists, Orientalists, and acousticians to support his argument that Eastern music was based on theoretical principles that differed from those of Western music, and that these had been systematically worked out by earlier Muslim scholars. According to Salih, different civilizations and ethnic groups had distinctive musical languages, which could only be appreciated if the listener had some degree of theoretical understanding and previous experience of the music being heard. While Salih concurred that science was universal rather than particular, he maintained that this related to acoustics rather than music.43 Hence, like science and mathematics in general, acoustics was not “European” but transcended cultural differences, while at the same time providing a practical and intellectual framework for demonstrating these differences in quantifiable and testable ways.

A Subtle Art: Attending to Ottoman Music

At the heart of these debates was the relationship between the mathematical representation of musical intervals and their auditory perception. For Salih, attentive listening mediated by the sonometer and other acoustic technologies could prove the existence of certain intervals in Ottoman music as well as their scientific validity. As a specific variety of auditory attention, we can refer to this as calculative listening. While the broader social and political implications of this mode of listening will be discussed in the following sections, for now I will use it mainly with reference to experiments in pitch perception. The primary purpose of calculative listening for Salih and his allies was to demonstrate that intervals described in early Islamicate treatises corresponded to those used in contemporary Ottoman music, and that they were grounded in universal acoustic laws. This offered a powerful riposte to critics such as Ahmed Midhat, who believed that pitches that fell outside of the recognized tonal framework of Western music were either incorrect or superfluous. As Midhat asserted, when closely related makams with subtle intonational differences were played on the piano, “we cannot detect these differences with our ears.”44 Yet if such intervals could be precisely calculated and perceived by means of the sonometer, this meant that the inability to hear pitches beyond the chromatic notes of the piano was due to a lack of proper auditory attention—meaning a mode of focused listening that was properly informed by scientific knowledge. At the same time, calculative listening offered a superior audile technique in comparison to the seemingly intuitive and unquantifiable modes of auditory attention that were employed by practicing Ottoman musicians, as illustrated by Salih’s fruitless efforts to explain the physics of sound to his interlocutors.

Salih’s acoustic experiments supposedly revealed the scientific basis of musical intervals that lay at the limits of auditory perception and yet constituted the essential difference between Ottoman and European music. According to Salih, the measurement of frequency using the sonometer made it possible to distinguish precisely between the major tone (9:8) and minor tone (10:9), “a difference the ear will be unable to sense” (“kulağın his edemeyeceği farkı”).45 Likewise, Yekta argued that while tetrachords based on either major or minor tones (as described by the thirteenth-century theorist al-Urmawī) can be realized exactly on an instrument such as the sonometer, “a violinist or a singer cannot, however, execute them one after the other in all their precision, because these different forms of the perfect fourth confuse the hearing.”46 The difference between a major and minor tone is equivalent to a syntonic comma (81:80 or 21.51 cents, referred to as koma). The same discrepancy is found, according to Salih, between the European note mi (in just intonation) and the Ottoman note hüseyni in the equivalent scale position.47

Although various types of comma were discussed by early Islamicate theorists based on their engagement with ancient Greek sources, the concept had been obsolete in Ottoman music since the early sixteenth century and was reintroduced by Yekta partly on the basis of modern European sources.48 The reintroduction of the comma was integral to the project of establishing a rational, accurate, and mathematically defined pitch system for Ottoman music. In isolation or in close juxtaposition with other intervals, the difference of a comma might be virtually imperceptible or easily misinterpreted by the untrained listener. Yet it now offered a conceptual means to explain and represent the subtle inflections of pitch and the diversity of intervallic and modal structures that distinguished Ottoman from European music. Furthermore, by empirically verifying the existence of the comma in Ottoman music, it became possible for an attentive listener to hear the difference between two closely adjacent pitches as a comma, rather than as “out of tune” (falso) in relation to the piano, or according to the mathematically imprecise and variable terms that were used prior to the establishment of the new theory.

As other acoustic experiments and debates during this period demonstrate, the relationship between the physical properties of sound and its auditory perception is rarely straightforward. Sounds that are not immediately audible to the ordinary listener (such as upper partials) require special apparatus and the training of auditory attention to be accurately perceived.49 Moreover, the inherently subjective nature of listening as a psychophysical process as well as the influence of conceptual or metaphysical frameworks may produce peculiar auditory effects including the perception of nonexistent sounds, as in Riemann’s undertones.50 More generally, experiences of pitch relations are determined to a large degree by learned habits and cultural values, so that even if the laws of acoustics are universal, the manner in which they are deployed, heard, and conceptualized within different musical systems is highly variable.51

Salih was evidently aware of some of these epistemological problems, as reflected in his distinction between the universality of “acoustics” and the particularity of “music.” It followed that if an interval such as the comma was explainable according to the universal laws of physics, its status as a distinguishing feature of Ottoman music had to be accounted for in cultural rather than purely scientific terms. The comma therefore not only demonstrated the scientific validity of Islamicate music theory, but also offered a ready explanation for the aesthetic values, modes of listening, and emotional effects that were believed to differentiate Ottoman from European music. Salih conceptualized this distinction in terms of the relative importance of subtle intonational nuances signified by the comma, which he explained by means of a spatial and sensorial analogy:

One of them [i.e., European music] resembles a very large and expansive park. The other one [i.e., Ottoman music] brings to mind the image of a pleasure garden that has been planted and adorned with perfumed flowers. While it is true that in such a large park the presence or absence of, for example, a carnation is of no importance whatsoever, in a blooming garden like Ottoman music, its lack will be immediately sensed.52

This analogy suggests that although the differences between European and Ottoman music can be scientifically measured, they are also determined by culturally specific aesthetic values and modes of attention. The image of the pleasure garden evokes the multisensorial and socially interactive context in which Ottoman music was ideally performed and enjoyed, and which was thought necessary to produce the desired emotional effects on the listener. Salih emphasized that he did not intend to disparage European music, only to point out that Ottoman music was an independent art with specific characteristics, which demanded a particular attention to subtle details. As he wrote, “I wish to explain that Ottoman music is not a part of Western music, and that while the latter is a great art (sanat-i aliye), the former is a subtle art (sanat-i dakika), and thus they are different things.”53

Although calculative listening was the dominant mode of audition in Salih’s acoustic experiments, his interpretive arguments suggest that other—more subtle—forms of auditory attention are required to fully understand and appreciate Ottoman music. The ambiguous relationship between physical sound, auditory perception, and aesthetic judgement is likewise encapsulated in the epigraph to Salih’s treatise on acoustics, which is taken from a speech given by the British mathematician and physicist Lord Kelvin in Birmingham in 1883: “There [giving a sudden clap of the hands]—that is a sound. There is no question about it—nobody will ever ask: Is it a sound or not? It is sound if you hear it. If you do not hear it, it is not to you a sound.”54 This choice of epigraph signals Salih’s commitment to scientific empiricism, in which objective knowledge can be obtained only through sensorial perception. At the same time, however, Salih sought to demonstrate in his treatise the existence of pitch relations specific to Ottoman music, the correct hearing and enjoyment of which depend on learned modes of auditory attention. Thus, the statement “If you do not hear it, it is not to you a sound” (“Eğer işitmez iseniz . . . sizin için sada değildir”) can simultaneously be understood as an acknowledgment that what constitutes a sound or pitch is at least partly determined by the culturally specific and subjective perception of the listener.

Calculative Listening, Synchronization, and Difference

By the early Republican period, the comma-based theory of pitch relations formulated by Salih and Yekta had been established as the definitive theory of Ottoman-Turkish music, which it remains (with some modifications) to this day. Its genesis in experimental acoustics and mathematics indicates a connection to the ideals of scientific progress and philosophical materialism that were widespread among Ottoman intellectuals in the 1890s, and which laid the ideological groundwork for the Young Turk revolution and eventually the founding of the Republic. The technique of calculative listening is thus directly related to the concept of calculative reason, which, as Asad shows, is central to the formation of the modern secular state.55 Calculative listening involved a disenchantment of audition based on the quantification of sound (in the form of frequencies, beats, intervals, ratios, and so on), which was conceived as an essentially material phenomenon whose nature could be objectively measured through instruments such as the sonometer, pitch pipe, and tuning fork. The cognitive, perceptual, and philosophical reorientations that this entailed were aligned with the project of creating rational subjects who were conversant with modern science and integrated into the social, bureaucratic, and technological structures of both the centralized state and the international order.

Calculative listening was an aspect of a broader shift in modes of auditory attention precipitated by the introduction of standardized systems of time measurement. Before the nineteenth century, daily time had been marked sonically in the Ottoman Empire primarily by the call to prayer, which was coordinated with the passage of the sun.56 Since the diurnal cycle depended on the time of the year and the location of the observer, the hours of the day were correspondingly variable in their onset and duration. The implementation of centralized technologies and systems of measurement was intended to eliminate such local variations and inaccuracies and demanded a new kind of auditory attention to the universal intervals of time regulated by the Imperial Observatory and signaled by the ticking of a clock, the clicking of a telegraphic message, or the firing of the noon cannon.57 Likewise, while the intervals of Ottoman music had previously been subject to local variation and flexibility, the introduction of modern acoustic instruments and systems of measurement required a focused attention to objective and invariable standards rather than a sensitivity to ephemeral moments of aesthetic pleasure or affective relationality. Such calculative modes of aural attention also engendered a desacralization of time, which became a neutral and objective series of numbers relating to the physical world rather than an expression of religious practice and cosmology.

Salih’s advocacy of Greenwich Mean Time was part of a larger effort to regulate the diverse calendrical and temporal systems that were used in the Ottoman Empire and to integrate them with international standards of time measurement. By this process, local perceptions of time would be synchronized both with the Imperial Observatory in Istanbul and with other metropoles such as Paris and London. This synchronization was achieved through technologies such as the chronometer and telescope as well as telegraphy and print media (including periodicals and almanacs), which depended on the international compatibility of quantitative data. Similarly, the standardization of pitch relations involved a process of temporal quantization using acoustic instruments, rendering the sounds of Ottoman music into measurable frequencies that adhered to the universal logic of numbers and were thus made legible and translatable across geographical and cultural boundaries. Furthermore, the institutionalization of an empirical theory of pitch relations would ensure that the variable and potentially conflicting intervals that occurred among music practitioners would be synchronized with one another (that is, all musicians would now consistently play the same intervals, precisely defined by their frequency ratios) and with the universal norms of modern science.

However, the ideal of universal synchronization could not be directly and instantaneously applied and had to contend with a multiplicity of material realities, everyday practices, and alternative subjectivities. Moreover, the materialist frameworks of modern science could not eradicate uncertainty and ambiguity. In 1909, Salih had argued that the noon cannon should be replaced by a time ball, since the time it took for the sound of the cannon to reach international ships in the Bosporus strait (not to mention the inevitable delay in telegraphic transmission between more distant locations) created an unacceptable margin of error.58 However, although he proposed that a time ball should be mounted on top of the Galata tower (the highest point in Istanbul), he discovered that vibrations caused by the nearby funicular railway meant that a telescope placed within the structure could not be completely stable.59 Hence, while modern technologies could in principle facilitate precise and objective measurement, in practice they were not infallible and could even create distortions and delays of perception. Furthermore, technologically mediated forms of attention nonetheless required a human observer or listener whose perception and interpretation of phenomena were inevitably conditioned by a variety of unpredictable factors. The sound of a pitch pipe tuned to 435 Hertz might signify a universal scientific value, or it might be interpreted as an absurd proposition about the nature of sound that was as irrelevant to musical practice as counting hairs on a sheepskin. There was no guarantee that an interval of duration or frequency would be attended to in the same way by different subjects, and standardized systems of time and pitch measurement therefore remained open to contestation and misinterpretation.

Salih’s description of Ottoman music as a “subtle art” encapsulates many of the tensions that existed within the project of scientific universalism and its acoustic, temporal, and psychological dimensions. The word dakik (dakika in its feminine adjectival form) connotes exactness or precision, and also supplies the noun for “minute” (dakika) in both its temporal and geometrical senses. A closely related word, dikkat, signifies careful attention. This cluster of meanings suggests that the objective grasp of phenomena such as time, space, or pitch involves a process of quantization into small, regular values, which is achieved by a narrowly focused and technologically mediated attention to detail. Yet this also entails the detection of intervals, gaps, or differences that are essential to calculation. The differential sonometer was designed not to measure single, isolated pitches, but the intervals between them; hence, the Ottoman-Turkish term for sonometer, mikyas-i savt, implies both “measurement” and “comparison” of sound. As we have seen, the difference between two pitches may be exceedingly subtle—another of the meanings of dakik—and indeed almost imperceptible for listeners who are unaccustomed to valuing such fine distinctions. It is therefore at risk of being misheard and may require a variety of attention that is less like comparing two notes on a piano than noticing the pleasing smell of a carnation in a garden in full bloom.

While differences between pitches could occur at the limits of perceptibility, the measurement and integration of such intervals into a larger system of pitch relations became the basis for another kind of differentiation: that between Ottoman (or “Eastern”) and European (or “Western”) music. The notion of cultural difference was as central to Salih’s experiments in acoustics as it was to his historical scholarship, which sought to document the existence of a distinctive Islamic or “Oriental” intellectual tradition even as it reaffirmed the universal validity of modern science and a related belief in civilization and progress. Such apparent tensions are also found in the careers of Yekta and his teacher Ataullah Efendi, both of whom continued to be active members of the Mevlevi Sufi order while also promoting calculative methods and materialist ontologies of sound. In order to better understand these complexities, it will be useful to consider how Sufi ideas of listening, attention, and temporality intersected with debates about modern science and psychology in the late Ottoman Empire, particularly in relation to the philosophy of Henri Bergson.

Auditory Temporalities: Sufism and Bergsonism

Sufi practices of listening are closely bound up with conceptions of temporality and attention, which is understood as inseparable from consciousness.60 As Ines Weinrich writes, audition (samāʿ) can be defined as “listening with spiritual intent in Sufi ritual practice,” and was central to the traditions of the Mevlevis as well as other orders active in the Ottoman Empire.61 Indeed, Sufism provided arguably the most important conceptual and ethical framework for practices of audition across the Islamicate world until the end of the nineteenth century. For the philosopher al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), whose tract on listening remains one of the most widely influential texts on the subject, “there is no entrance to the heart save by the ante-chamber of the ear.”62 Thus, attentive listening provides access to the innermost recesses of the soul, in which both the true state of the auditor and the presence of God can be felt. However, this can be achieved only with the right conditions of time, place, and company. Listeners in a ritual gathering should not be distracted by worldly concerns or by the behavior of those who are less spiritually developed, and must be calmly attentive and “present in heart.”63 Furthermore, the effects of music depend on the listener’s stage of spiritual attainment. The most adept listener enters a state of ecstasy (wajd) in which the self is dissolved into the oneness of being (waḥdat al-wujūd). Proper auditory attention is therefore possible only in the social context of ritual practice, and although it is determined by the subjective state of the listener it also produces a mode of consciousness in which there is no autonomous self.

These spiritual practices are closely connected to Sufi ideas of time. The concept of waqt (time, hour, moment) refers to an intimate experience of divine presence in which the practitioner perceives the eternity of the past and the future in each moment.64 According to al-Sarrāj (d. 988), waqt is “the breath between two other breaths, or the thought that lies between two other thoughts.”65 The adept may experience the timelessness of waqt through audition and the closely related practice of dhikr (remembrance), in which attention is directed to the repetition of divine names as a means of constantly recalling God’s presence. In the Mevlevi ayin, a complex musical structure orchestrates a series of coordinated cyclic movements whose choreography mirrors the revolutions of the heavenly spheres.66 While these ritual practices might be understood as forms of synchronization, they are better described as involving entrainment, or the spontaneous emergence of embodied coordination under specific conditions. Relatedly, although Sufi practices of auditory attention require the exercise of will and intention, their goal is neither to gain precise knowledge of the physical world nor to establish a sovereign subject, but to create conditions for the “passing away” or “annihilation” (fanāʾ) of the individual self through collective ritual, and thereby to become conscious of the fundamental unity of existence.

In some ways, there may seem to be a clear opposition between Sufi understandings of auditory attention and what I have referred to as calculative listening. In Sufi and Islamic cosmologies, neither physical phenomena, time, nor individual subjectivity exist independently of the will of God. Experiences of audition and temporality in this framework appear fundamentally distinct from the varieties of attention produced by modern technological, scientific, and social structures, which are predicated on the essentially material nature of the world and its perception by an autonomous subject within empty homogenous time.67 Furthermore, this ontological and epistemological divide seems to fit neatly with broader historiographical plots concerning the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, in which Islamic religious tradition is overcome or suppressed by secular Western modernity. However, while I argue that new modes of auditory perception did indeed emerge in conjunction with modern scientific technologies and discourses, and that these developments were profoundly shaped by Ottoman relations with Europe, more complicated realities lie beneath this schematic narrative.

As a number of scholars have shown, the implementation of standardized time measurement in Ottoman territories did not immediately or wholly erase existing temporal practices and subjectivities, and in fact provided conditions for the articulation of a variety of “counter-temporalities.”68 Relatedly, if modernity promoted calculative and disenchanted modes of attention, it also led to a proliferation of interest in more elusive forms of subjectivity such as hypnosis, trance, and the unconscious.69 This was equally true in the Ottoman Empire, where intellectuals of diverse social backgrounds and political orientations engaged with a range of contemporary discourses, including positivism and materialism as well as spiritualism, psychology, and occultism, while also critically reevaluating older scientific and philosophical traditions.70 Whether in terms of institutions and personalities or concepts and ideologies, these engagements were typically characterized by complex syntheses rather than strict oppositions between different elements.

An apt example is the reception of Bergsonian philosophy by Ottoman and other non-European intellectuals. Bergson likened aesthetic experience, and attending to music and rhythm in particular, to a receptive state of hypnosis.71 This was part of a broader argument about the nature of perception and subjectivity in which Bergson rejected the physical determinism of experimental psychologists and scientists such as Ribot or Helmholtz and instead posited a model of consciousness defined by the continuous interpenetration of heterogenous temporal and psychic states, which constituted “duration” (durée).72 As Martin Jay argues, rather than the kinds of abstract spatialization associated with vision, Bergson was interested in multimodal forms of sensorial perception that produce affective states shaped by the interplay of presence and memory, such as the smell of a rose.73 For Bergson, intuition—as opposed to analysis, which separates heterogenous experiences into spatialized and differentiated representations—offers a means to grasp the multitudinous singularity of duration as the fusion of embodied perception and memory. This is connected to a distinction between the qualitative multiplicity of duration as lived experience and the quantitative multiplicity of time as numerical calculation.74 Accordingly, in Bergsonian terms the cognitive representation of relative differences in pitch involves a quantitative spatialization that is at one remove from the indeterminate and affective experience of pure sonic quality.75

There are significant points of contact between Bergson’s ideas and Sufi philosophies of audition and temporality. The concept of durée bears a ­notable resemblance to waqt, while Bergson’s portrayal of music and dance as forms of embodied receptivity that allow access to deeper unities of experience might easily be applied to Sufi ritual practices. More generally, his refutations of physical determinism, mechanization, and calculative reason appealed to moderate Islamists who wished to critique the materialism of European modernity as well as the secularism and scientism of the CUP and the early Republican state.76 But although Bergsonism offered emancipatory possibilities for some non-European intellectuals, it was also interpreted in conflicting ways and pressed into the service of diverse political ideologies including fascism and ethnic nationalism.77

Furthermore, Bergson himself was susceptible to racist discourses of cognitive difference between civilized Europeans and primitive non-Europeans, and readily justified the French colonization of North Africa on the grounds of Muslims’ supposed indolence and indifference to change and progress.78 Although few maintained that Islam itself was a cause of psychological passivity or backwardness, the idea that Muslim civilization had declined due to a lack of scientific progress was commonplace among late Ottoman intellectuals. Thus, while some scholars argued that Bergson’s concept of intuition had been anticipated by al-Ghazālī, others believed that the latter’s approach to philosophy had overshadowed more rationalistic and scientific currents of Islamic thought.79 In reformist discourses, Sufism was often associated with states of idleness and mental dissipation, and with an irrational, timeless mysticism that was out of step with the mechanized, scientific, and economically productive modes of attention that were necessary to keep pace with modern life.80

These discourses were a product of ideological battles fought both locally and globally over the meanings of modernity in the early twentieth century, rather than an accurate description of the complexities of individual subjects and social groups. The interest of Rauf Yekta and Ataullah Efendi in acoustic instruments such as the sonometer should be understood both in the context of the historical role of Sufis as timekeepers, astronomers, clockmakers, and music theorists in the Ottoman Empire, and in relation to their long-standing philosophical, ethical, and practical commitment to audition as a medium of knowledge.81 Hence, the utilization of analytical concepts and technologies did not preclude an intuitive grasp of the immediacy of experience, or of varieties of consciousness that lie beyond the measurable domain of material phenomena. Conversely, although Salih Zeki’s philosophical outlook was generally oriented toward positivism, he also translated works by Henri Poincaré, whose ideas about intuition and indeterminacy (together with those of his brother-in-law Émile Boutroux) were invoked by reformist Muslim theologians to critique the vulgar materialism of more radical Ottoman thinkers.82 There was, then no clear divide between secular European modernity and Islamic religious tradition, but a plurality of positions that attempted in various ways to articulate the complex subjectivities that emerged through the entanglement of local and global forces.

Conclusion

Forms of auditory and temporal attention in the late Ottoman Empire, whether defined by the intellectual frameworks of Sufism, Bergsonism, or scientific materialism, were inescapably social and political—in terms of how they were experienced and mediated through technological and social structures, how they were conceptualized by practitioners and observers, and what they signified in the context of broader philosophical debates and political formations. They were also multiple, heterogenous, and indeterminate, in contrast to the idea that certain cultures are confined to a single, unchanging mode of consciousness, or that the advent of modernity precipitated a universal progression from one mode to another. The mapping of oppositions between intuitive and analytical states of consciousness onto the geographies of East and West—whether by Orientalists, colonialists, radical secularists, or religious conservatives—tends to overlook the fact that calculative reason was not a uniquely European invention, but enjoyed a prominent place within the history of Islamicate science and mathematics, as the scholarship of Salih Zeki demonstrated. It was only the instrumentalization of calculative methods by modern states, institutions, and economic systems that made it seem as if there was an unbridgeable divide between analysis and intuition, or between different forms of social organization and cultural production based on these varieties of consciousness. Thus, if the imposition of modern scientific discourses and technologies produced modes of auditory attention that were increasingly shaped by calculative reason and the synchronization of global networks, it also offered means to enunciate the value of cultural difference, to revitalize older aesthetic and intellectual traditions, and to formulate alternative ways of being in the modern world.

Notes

1. 1.  Research for this chapter was supported by the project Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789–1922, approved by the European Research Council and funded by UK Research and Innovation (EP/X032833/1). I am grateful to a number of people who helped to improve the chapter by commenting on earlier drafts and presentations, including Peter McMurray, David Trippett, Onur Engin, Nazan Maksudyan, Hande Betül Ünal, Elif Yumru, Carmel Raz, Francesca Brittan, David Cohen, and an anonymous reviewer. Thanks are also due to Vera Wolkowicz for inviting me to present the research as part of the Royal Musical Association Research Colloquium series at the University of Glasgow in February 2025.
2. 2.  The intellectual and historical background of this theory has been explored in previous literature, though without a detailed discussion of Salih Zeki’s contributions or its relation to experimental acoustics. See Jacob Olley, “Measuring Progress: The Ottoman Revival of Systematist Music Theory, c. 1900,” Oriens 51, nos. 1–2 (2023): 127–54; and Okan Murat Öztürk, “Türk Müziğinde Yekta, Ezgi ve Arel Teorilerinin Pozitivist İnşası: Kısa Fakat Eleştirel Bir Tarihçe,” Eurasian Journal of Music and Dance 16 (2020): 171–215.
3. 3.  For general discussions of samāʿ, see Leonard Lewisohn, “The Sacred Music of Islam: Samā‘ in the Persian Sufi Tradition,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 6 (1997): 1–33; Arthur Gribetz, “The Samāʿ Controversy: Sufi vs. Legalist,” Studia Islamica 74 (1991): 43–62. On the connections between Sufism and Ottoman court music, see Walter Feldman, From Rumi to the Whirling Dervishes: Music, Poetry, and Mysticism in the Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
4. 4.  See, e.g., Seydī’s Book on Music: A 15th Century Turkish Discourse, ed. and trans. Eugenia Popescu Judetz in collaboration with Eckhard Neubauer (Frankfurt: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science at the Wolfgang Goethe University, 2004), 20–25.
5. 5.  Nina Ergin, “The Soundscapes of Sixteenth-Century Istanbul Mosques: Architecture and Qur’an Recital,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 67, no. 2 (2008): 204–21; Nina Ergin, “Multi-Sensorial Messages of the Divine and the Personal: Qur’an Inscriptions and Recitation in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Mosques in Istanbul,” in Calligraphy and Architecture in the Muslim World, ed. Mohammad Gharipour and İrvin Cemil Schick (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 105–118. For wider reflections on the aural reception of the Quran, see Navid Kermani, God Is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Experience of the Quran, trans. Tony Crawford (Malden: Polity, 2015).
6. 6.  Avner Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), chapter 1.
7. 7.  For a discussion of the ways in which the sonic dimensions of modern technologies transformed religious sensibilities, see Adam Mestyan, “Upgrade? Power and Sound During Ramadan and ‘Id al-Fitr in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Arab Provinces,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37, no. 2 (2017): 262–79.
8. 8.  On the creation and dissemination of international standards of pitch, see Fanny Gribenski, Tuning the World: The Rise of 440 Hertz in Music, Science, and Politics, 1859–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023). For more general discussions of the rise of modern acoustics, see Viktoria Tkaczyk, Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities Around 1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023); Viktoria Tkaczyk, Mara Mills, and Alexandra Hui, eds., Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Alexandra Hui, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013); Benjamin Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). On global practices and experiences of temporality in the modern era, see Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015); On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); and Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks.
9. 9.  Talal Asad, Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
10. 10.  For a discussion of synchronization in the semi-autonomous Ottoman province of Egypt, see On Barak, “Synchronization and Its Discords: Calendric Reform and Imperial Politics at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” in Egypt and Empire: The Formation of Religious Identity After Rome, ed. Elisabeth R. O’Connell (Leuven: Peeters, 2022), 133–48.
11. 11.  On science and political ideology in the late Ottoman period, see M. Alper Yalçınkaya, Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Şeyma Afacan, “Idle Souls, Regulated Emotions of a Mind Industry: A New Look at Ottoman Materialism,” Journal of Islamic Studies 32, no. 3 (2021): 317–53; Şükrü Hanioğlu, “Blueprints for a Future Society: Late Ottoman Materialists on Science, Religion, and Art,” in Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy, ed. Elisabeth Özdalga (London: Routledge, 2005), 28–116.
12. 12.  For Salih’s biography, see Şeref Etker, “Salih Zeki Bey: Üç Boyutlu Bir Biyografi İçin,” Osmanlı Bilimi Araştırmaları 7, no. 1 (2005): 137–54; Alper Atasoy, “Türk Bilim Tarihçiliğinde Salih Zeki: Hayatı, Çalışmalar ve Eserleri,” in Şimdiyi Bilmek ve Geçmişi Anlamak: Bilim ile Bilim Tarihi Arasında Salih Zeki, ed. Elif Baga (Istanbul: Ketebe Yayınları, 2021), 17–46; Remzi Demir and İnan Kalaycıoğulları, “Büyük Bir Matematik Tarihçisi ve Felsefecisi: Salih Zeki Bey (1864–1921),” Kutadgubilig Felsefe-Bilim Araştırmaları 6 (2004): 195–211.
13. 13.  Feza Günergün, “Salih Zeki ve Astronomi: Rasathane-i Amire Müdürlüğü’nden 1914 Tam Güneş Tutulmasına,” Osmanlı Bilimi Araştırmaları 7, no. 1 (2005): 97–122. Coumbary is often mistakenly identified as French, but he was actually an Ottoman subject (of Greek heritage) born in Istanbul. See Aykut Kar, “Arşiv Belgeleri Işığında Rasathane-i Amire’nin Müdürü Coumbary Efendi’nin Çalışmaları,” in Yeditepe Üniversitesi Tarih Bölümü I. Uluslararası Türk Kültürü ve Tarihi Sempozyumu 19-20-21 Nisan 2018 Bildiri Kitabı, ed. Ahmet Taşağıl, Aykut Kar, Ahmet Büyükaksoy, and Ayşen Müderrisoğlu (Istanbul: Yeditepe Üniversitesi Tarih Bölümü, 2018), 610–25.
14. 14.  Though, as a number of scholars have shown, such international agreements were subject to dispute and took several decades to come into widespread effect. See Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time and Charles W. J. Withers, Zero Degrees: Geographies of the Prime Meridian (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). For musical parallels, see Gribenski, Tuning the World.
15. 15.  Günergün, “Salih Zeki ve Astronomi,” 104–5. For details of Salih’s involvement in time reform, see Tuğçe Kancı Karagedikli, “Horological Connections: Salih Zeki and the Standardization of Clocks in the Late Ottoman Empire” (Master’s thesis, Middle East Technical University, 2024).
16. 16.  The exact causes of Salih’s death in 1921 when he was only in his late fifties are unclear, though most sources report a neurological condition of some sort. See Atasoy, “Türk Bilim Tarihçiliğinde Salih Zeki,” 27; Etker, “Salih Zeki Bey,” 139.
17. 17.  For a preliminary bibliography, see Alper Atasoy, “Salih Zeki’nin Makaleleri: Bir Bibliyografya Denemesi,” Osmanlı Bilimi Araştırmaları 23, no. 2 (2022): 335–94.
18. 18.  On Lacoine, see Günergün, “Salih Zeki ve Astronomi,” 117–18.
19. 19.  For further references and analysis, see Kancı Karagedikli, “Horological Connections.”
20. 20.  One of Salih’s articles on Comte was written and published together with his second wife, the prominent novelist, feminist, and Turkish nationalist Halide Edib (1884–1964). See Atasoy, “Salih Zeki’nin Makaleleri,” 383, and Demir and Kalaycıoğulları, “Büyük Bir Matematik Tarihçisi,” 203.
21. 21.  For Salih’s own account of this research, see the transcription provided in Demir and Kalaycıoğulları, “Büyük Bir Matematik Tarihçisi,” 197–99. For an early assessment of his historical scholarship, see the review by A. Adnan, “Ṣāliḥ Zekī [sic], Athār-i-Bāqiya, a history of Arabic mathematics,” Isis 19, no. 3 (1933): 506–15.
22. 22.  Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī Ās̱ār-i baḳīye, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Maṭbaʿa-i ʿāmire, 1329/1911).
23. 23.  Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī, Ḥikmet-i ṭabīʿīye (Istanbul: Ḳarabet maṭbaʿası, 1311/1894), 477–607.
24. 24.  For further discussion, see Feza Günergun, “Derviş Mehmed Emin pacha (1817–1879), serviteur de la science et de l’État ottoman,” in Médecins et ingénieurs ottomans à l’âge des nationalismes, ed. Méropi Anastassiadou-Dumont (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2003), 171–83; Meltem Akbaş, “The Military March of Physics II: Teachers and Textbooks of Physics and Mechanical Sciences of the 19^th Century Ottoman Military Schools,” Osmanlı Bilimi Araştırmaları 14, no. 1 (2012): 89–108.
25. 25.  Ṣāliḥ Ẕeḳī, Mebḥās̱-i ṣavt (Istanbul: Maṭbaʿa-i ʿāmire, 1326/1910). For a partial transcription and commentary, see Ayşegül Başar, “Salih Zeki Bey’in ‘Hikmet-i Tabîiyye-i Umûmiyye’den Mebhâs-ı Savt’ İsimli Eseri ve ‘Mûsikî Sesleri’ Bölümünün İncelenmesi” (Master’s thesis, Sakarya University, 2021). See also İrem Aslan Seyhan, “Salih Zeki’nin Hikmet-i Tabî‘iyye-i ‘Umûmiyyeden Mebhas-i Savt Eseri,” in Ölümünün 100. Yılında Bilim Tarihçisi Salih Zeki’yi Anmak ve Anlamak Paneli Bildiri Kitabı, ed. Vural Başaran (Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Merkezi Başkanlığı, 2022), 45–59.
26. 26.  David Pantalony, Altered Sensations: Rudolph Koenig’s Acoustical Workshop in Nineteenth-Century Paris (New York: Springer, 2009), 9–11; Paolo Brenni, “19^th Century French Scientific Instrument Makers. VI: The Triumph of Experimental Acoustics: Albert Marloye (1795–1874) and Rudolph Koenig (1832–1901),” Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society 44 (1995): 13–17.
27. 27.  Pantalony, Altered Sensations, 262–65.
28. 28.  For descriptions of experiments using the sonometer, see C. L. Barnes, Lessons in Elementary Practical Physics, vol. 3, part 1: Practical Acoustics (London: Macmillan and Co., 1897), 18–22. Salih explains the construction of the sonometer in Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī, Ḥikmet-i ṭabīʿīye, 564–5, and briefly describes his experimental methods in Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī, “ʿAṭūfetlü Aḥmed Midḥat Efendi ḥażretlerine,” İḳdām, no. 1638 (January 29, 1899), 2–3.
29. 29.  For Yekta’s account of this research, see Raouf Yekta, “La musique turque,” in Encyclopédie de la musique et dictionnaire du conservatoire. Première partie: Histoire de la musique, vol. 5, ed. Albert Lavignac and Lionel de la Laurencie (Paris: Librairie Delagrave, 1922), 2945–3064, at 2982–84. For discussion, see Olley, “Measuring Progress,” and Öztürk, “Türk Müziğinde Yekta, Ezgi ve Arel.”
30. 30.  Yekta, “La musique turque,” 2984; Raʾūf Yektā, “Fisaġoras ġāmı 2,” İkdām, no. 1668 (February 28, 1899), 3–4, at 3, translit. in Rauf Yekta, Türk Müzikolojisinin Kurucusu Rauf Yekta Bey, vol. 3: Polemik Yazıları, ed. Mehmet Öncel and Muhammet Ali Çergel (Istanbul: Ketebe Yayınları, 2024), 119–27, at 121. According to Yekta, before Ataullah began using a sonometer it was also used by Prince Abdulhalim Pasha (1830–94), a member of the Egyptian khedivial family who was banished to Istanbul in 1868: cited in İbnülemin Mahmut Kemal İnal, Hoş Sadâ: Son Asır Türk Musikişinasları (Istanbul: Maarif Basımevi, 1958), 85. Both Ataullah and Abdulhalim were high-ranking Freemasons, in common with Idrīs Rāghib Bey (1862–1931), another Egyptian intellectual who conducted experiments with the sonometer, as documented in Muḥammad Kāmil al-Khulaʿī, Kitāb al-musīqā al-sharqī ([Cairo]: Maṭbaʿat al-taqaddum, 1322/1904), opposite 32 (my thanks to Salah Eddin Maraqa for this reference). On the links of these figures to Freemasonry, see Thierry Zarcone, “Şeyh Mehmed Ataullah Dede (1842–1910) ve Galata Mevlevîhânesi: Doğu-Batı Arasında Entelektüel ve Tinsel Bir Köprü,” in Saltanatın Dervişleri Dervişlerin Saltanatı: İstanbul’da Mevlevîlik, ed. Ekrem Işın (Istanbul: Suna ve İnan Kıraç Vakfı İstanbul Araştırmaları Enstitüsü, 2007), 58–75; Karim Wissa, “Freemasonry in Egypt 1798–1921: A Study in Cultural and Political Encounters,” Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) 16, no. 2 (1989): 143–61.
31. 31.  Yekta, “La musique turque,” 2984; Raʾūf Yektā, “Rūm kilīselerinde mūsīḳī,” İḳdām, no. 1930 (November 17, 1899), 4, translit. in Türk Müzikolojisinin Kurucusu, 151–60, at 158. Although Yekta states that his first article appeared in İkdam on April 6, 1898 (“La musique turque,” 2382), he began publishing in Resimli Gazete on January 11, 1897 (Olley, “Measuring Progress,” 137–38).
32. 32.  For simplified transliterations of Ahmed Midhat’s articles on music, see Fazlı Arslan, Ahmet Midhat Efendi ve Mûsikî: Batılılaşma Döneminin İlk Metinleri (Istanbul: VafıkBank Kültür Yayınları, 2020). Yekta’s responses are transliterated in Türk Müzikolojisinin Kurucusu; he summarizes the exchange in “La musique turque,” 2982–84. On the broader context of the debate, see Jacob Olley, “An Orient of One’s Own: Music and Islamic Modernism in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle 54 (2023): 21–36.
33. 33.  İsmāʿīl, “Raʾūf Yektā Beğ’e iḫtār,” Ṣabāḥ, no. 3276 (January 5, 1899), 3.
34. 34.  Raʾūf Yektā, “‘İsmāʿīl’ imżālı varaḳa ṣāḥibine,” İḳdām, no. 1615 (January 6, 1899), 3, translit. in Türk Müzikolojisinin Kurucusu, 107.
35. 35.  Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī, “İsmāʿīl Beğ Efendi’ye,” İḳdām, no. 1616 (January 7, 1899), 3, translit. in Samet Tengiz, “İkdam Gazetesi’nde Mûsikî Makaleleri (Transkribe ve İnceleme)” (Master’s thesis, Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University, 2020), 67–73.
36. 36.  Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī, “İsmāʿīl Beğ,” 70.
37. 37.  Ibid.
38. 38.  Ibid.
39. 39.  Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī, “İsmāʿīl Beğ,” 71–73.
40. 40.  Raʾūf Yektā, “Üstād-i muḥterem saʿādetlü Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī Beğ Efendi ḥażretlerine,” İḳdām, no. 1621 (January 12, 1899), 3, translit. in Türk Müzikolojisinin Kurucusu, 108–10.
41. 41.  Aḥmed Midḥat, “Saʿādetlü Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī Beğ Efendi ḥażretlerine,” Tercüman-i ḥaḳīḳāt, no. 6363 (January 11, 1899), 2–3, translit. in Arslan, Ahmet Midhat Efendi, 195–202, at 196.
42. 42.  Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī, “ʿAṭūfetlü Aḥmed Midḥat Efendi ḥażretlerine,” İḳdām, no. 1627 (January 18, 1899), 2–3, at 2, translit. in Arslan, Ahmet Midhat Efendi, 283–87, at 283. For the following installments, see: Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī, “ʿAṭūfetlü Aḥmed Midḥat Efendi ḥażretlerine,” İḳdām, no. 1632 (January 23, 1899), 2–3; no. 1638 (January 29, 1899), 2–3; no. 1639 (January 30, 1899), 2–3; no. 1647 (February 7, 1899), 3; no. 1649 (February 9, 1899), 3. The contents of the articles are summarized in Arslan, Ahmet Midhat Efendi, 185–95.
43. 43.  Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī, “ʿAṭūfetlü Aḥmed Midḥat Efendi” (January 29, 1899), 2.
44. 44.  Aḥmed Midḥat, “Saʿādetlü Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī Beğ,” 3, translit. in Arslan, Ahmet Midhat Efendi, 201.
45. 45.  Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī, “İsmāʿīl Beğ,” translit. in Tengiz, “İkdam Gazetesi’nde Mûsikî,” 70.
46. 46.  Yekta, “La musique turque,” 2990. The tetrachords are 9:8 + 9:8 + 256:243 and 10:9 + 10:9 + 27:25 respectively. For details of al-Urmawī’s theoretical system, see Owen Wright, The Modal System of Arab and Persian Music, A.D. 1250–1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
47. 47.  Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī, “ʿAṭūfetlü Aḥmed Midḥat Efendi” (January 23, 1899), 2.
48. 48.  For further discussion, see Olley, “Measuring Progress.”
49. 49.  On the role of attention in acoustic experiments, see Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener, chapter 3.
50. 50.  See David Trippett’s contribution in this volume.
51. 51.  An argument along these lines had been made in 1885 by Alexander Ellis, “On the Musical Scales of Various Nations,” Journal of the Society of Arts 33, no. 1688 (March 27, 1885): 485–527. For further discussion of the relationship between concepts of tuning and colonial difference, see Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit, “On Offering Oneself to Music History: Perspectives and Positionalities from Colonial Siam,” Journal of Musicology 40, no. 3 (2023): 275–83.
52. 52.  Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī, “ʿAṭūfetlü Aḥmed Midḥat Efendi” (January 23, 1899), 2.
53. 53.  Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī, “ʿAṭūfetlü Aḥmed Midḥat Efendi” (January 29,1899), 2.
54. 54.  William Thomson [Lord Kelvin], “The Six Gateways of Knowledge,” in Popular Lectures and Addresses, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1889), 253–99, at 270–71. Cf. Ṣāliḥ Ẕeḳī, Mebḥās̱-i ṣavt, front matter, translit. in Başar, “Salih Zeki Bey’in ‘Hikmet-i Tabîiyye-i Umûmiyye’den Mebhâs-ı Savt’,” 56.
55. 55.  Asad, Secular Translations.
56. 56.  For further discussion, see Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, chapter 1; Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, chapter 6; Mestyan, “Upgrade?”
57. 57.  For accounts of listening to the chimes of clock towers, see Mehmet Bengü Uluengin, “Secularizing Anatolia Tick by Tick: Clock Towers in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 1 (2010): 17–36. On other sonic technologies, see Onur Engin, “Church Bells, Cannons, and Talking Machines: Sounding Devices and the ‘Modernization’ of Late Ottoman Istanbul” (PhD diss., Koç University, 2021).
58. 58.  Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī, “Baḥrīye Nāẓırı Paşa ḥażretlerine,” Ṭanīn, no. 167 (January 18, 1909), 2–3. See Kancı Karagedikli, “Horological Connections,” 50–55.
59. 59.  Ṣāliḥ Ẕekī, “Baḥrīye Nāẓırı Paşa,” 2; Kance Karagedikli, “Horological Connections,” 52.
60. 60.  Muhammad U. Faruque, “Attention, Consciousness, and Self-Cultivation in Sufi-Philosophical Thought,” Journal of the Institute for Sufi Studies 2, no. 2 (2023): 300–316.
61. 61.  Ines Weinrich, “Sensing Sound: Aesthetic and Religious Experience According to al-Ghazālī,” Entangled Religions 10 (2019), https://doi.org/10.13154/er.10.2019.8437, para 13. On Mevlevism and music, see Feldman, From Rumi to the Whirling Dervishes and Anders Hammarlund, Tord Olsson, and Elisabeth Özdalga, eds., Sufism, Music and Society in Turkey and the Middle East: Papers Read at a Conference Held at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, November 27–29, 1997 (Istanbul: Svenska Forskningsinstitutet Istanbul, 2001).
62. 62.  The book on music and listening from al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (Revival of the religious sciences) is translated in Duncan B. MacDonald, “Emotional Religion in Islām as Affected by Music and Singing,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (April 1901): 195–252; (October 1901): 705–48; (January 1902): 1–28. The quote is from April 1901, p. 199. For further discussion, see Weinrich, “Sensing Sound” and Lewisohn, “The Sacred Music of Islam.”
63. 63.  MacDonald, “Emotional Religion” (January 1902), 3.
64. 64.  Jean-Jacques Thibon, “Sufi Views on Time and History,” in Sufi Cosmology, ed. Christian Lange and Alexander Knysh (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2023), 89–108, at 91–97. See also Gerhard Böwering, “Ideas of Time in Persian Sufism,” Iran 30 (1992): 77–89.
65. 65.  Thibon, “Sufi Views,” 96.
66. 66.  Böwering, “Ideas of Time,” 86; Feldman, From Rumi to the Whirling Dervishes, 81–84.
67. 67.  Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999); Michael Hagner, “Toward a History of Attention in Culture and Science,” MLN 118, no. 3 (2003): 670–87.
68. 68.  Barak, On Time, 252–65; Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks. See also Vanessa Ogle, “Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s–1940s,” American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (2013): 1376–1402.
69. 69.  Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 65–71.
70. 70.  Afacan, “Idle Souls”; Şeyma Afacan, “Searching for the Soul in Shades of Grey: Modern Psychology’s Spiritual Past in the Late Ottoman Empire,” European Journal of Turkish Studies 32 (2021), https://doi.org/10.4000/ejts.7248; Özgür Türesay, “Between Science and Religion: Spiritism in the Ottoman Empire (1850s–1910s),” Studia Islamica 113, no. 2 (2018): 166–200.
71. 71.  Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013 [1910]), 11–18. See also Alexandra Kieffer, “Bergson, Debussy, and Early Twentieth-Century Psychologie,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72, no. 2 (2019): 563–69; Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 47–52.
72. 72.  On Bergson’s understanding of attention, see Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 316–28; Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 130–38.
73. 73.  Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 113–14. Cf. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 161–62.
74. 74.  On the perception of the sound of a pendulum and its spatial representation, see Bergson, Time and Free Will, 104–10.
75. 75.  Bergson, Time and Free Will, 44–46.
76. 76.  Nazım İrem, “Bergson and Politics: Ottoman-Turkish Encounters with Innovation,” The European Legacy 16, no. 7 (2011): 873–82; Afacan, “Searching for the Soul,” 12–16. See also Damian A. Howard, Being Human in Islam: The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview (London & New York: Routledge, 2011), chapter 2. On Bergsonism in global anticolonial thought, see Souleyman Bachir Diagne, Postcolonial Bergson, trans. Lindsay Turner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020) and Andrea J. Pitts and Mark William Westmoreland, eds., Beyond Bergson: Examining Race and Colonialism Through the Writings of Henri Bergson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019).
77. 77.  Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Negritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
78. 78.  Larry S. McGrath, “Bergson, Servant of Colonialism: Education and Empire in North Africa Under the French Third Republic,” Bergsoniana 2 (2022), https://doi.org/10.4000/bergsoniana.920.
79. 79.  M. Sait Özervarlı, “Ottoman Perceptions of al-Ghazālī’s Works and Discussions on His Historical Role in Its Late Period,” in Islam and Rationality: The Impact of al-Ghazālī, vol. 2, ed. Frank Griffel (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 253–82, at 260–62 and 277.
80. 80.  See e.g. M. Brett Wilson, “The Twilight of Ottoman Sufism: Antiquity, Immorality, and Nation in Yakup Kadrı Karaosmanoğlu’s Nur Baba,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49, no. 2 (2017): 233–53; and Afacan, “Idle Souls.”
81. 81.  Feza Günergun, “Timekeepers and Sufi Mystics: Technical Knowledge Bearers of the Ottoman Empire,” Technology and Culture 62, no. 2 (2021): 348–72. On Sufi engagements with modern technologies and institutions, see Brian Silverstein, “Sufism and Governmentality in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29, no. 2 (2009): 171–85.
82. 82.  M. Sait Özervarlı, “Alternative Approaches to Modernization in the Late Ottoman Period: İzmirli İsmail Hakkı’s Religious Thought Against Materialist Scientism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39, no. 1 (2007): 77–102, at 81.