The Sensational Past by Carolyn Purnell

Author:Carolyn Purnell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

The caption reads: “If only they had all occupied their time on the same machine. Father Castel links sounds and colors.”

By and large, though, over the course of his pursuit, Castel felt that the public had “abandoned him,” leaving him attacked by an audience pitted against his harpsichord.33 Castel did endure some harsh criticism. This stinging caricature by Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin, created sometime between 1740 and 1757, shows just how ludicrous some of Castel’s audience found his creation: Castel sits at the instrument, ready to play, but instead of being greeted by the blissful harmonies of Paradise, he is greeted by an arc of water coming from an enema syringe. What Castel intended as an impressive pursuit, Saint-Aubin depicted as a ridiculous mess.

The ocular harpsichord had been only the first piece of Castel’s musical puzzle. Originally, he had intended to devise an “entire music,” or “sensible” music—which included musics of sound, sight, taste, smell, and touch—and other instruments of sensible music that would have been equivalent to violins, flutes, cymbals, and trumpets.34 But because of the difficulties he had with the harpsichord, Castel never got underway with the others.

Castel’s theories may have been a failure on a practical front, but they continued to fascinate scientists, writers, and artists for years to come. In 1753, Antoine Le Camus—the same man that developed the “mental medicine” of Chapter One—argued that taste could be reduced to a science similar to Castel’s music-color system. He speculated that, like the seven tones, there might be seven base flavors. Thus, “It would be possible to have in flavors a harmony even more real than that which could be formed by the ocular harpsichord.”35 Following suit, the marvelously named Polycarpe Poncelet published a book called Chemistry of Taste and Odor (1755), in which he argued that liquor could be used to “transmit agreeable sensations to the brain.”36 To better orchestrate these agreeable sensations, Poncelet proposed a music of taste that was comprised of seven flavors (acidic, bland, sweet, bitter, bittersweet, sour, and spicy). Such an analogy was possible, he argued, because flavor comes from particle vibrations that affect the sense of taste, just like vibrations in the air affect the sense of hearing. In the second edition of the book (1774), Poncelet described a prototype of a liqueur organ that he had produced according to Castel’s theories. He constructed a small buffet with two bellows and a series of acoustical tubes, alongside which were a series of vials filled with liqueurs that represented the primitive flavors. Pressing on a key would uncork the bottle and trigger a mechanism that would let the liqueurs flow into a reservoir. Poncelet admitted that he had not been scrupulous enough in choosing the liqueurs since he picked things that he knew would taste good together instead of truly testing the music’s ability to create delightful concoctions.37

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