Musicians heard combination tones a century before physicists explained them

Evidence

Before Ohm and Helmholtz came along, the issue of phantom tones and beat tones was thought to be resolved. Thomas Young (figure 25.4), an amazingly talented British polymath who helped decode the Rosetta Stone and worked out much of vision theory (and along the way performed an interference experiment with light that is today a paradigm of quantum mechanics), took up the question of phantom tones. The subject was initially raised by the violinist Giuseppe Tartini in 1754 and the German organist and composer Georg Andreas Sorge in 1745. They had heard the beat tones as “third notes” when playing two others. — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 2297

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme (from One Square Inch, The Soundscape) that trained listeners perceive phenomena theory only later explains.