The experiment was simple. Ernst Florens Chladni scattered sand on a glass plate and stroked the plate with a bow. The bow caused the plate to resonate, and the vibrations caused the sand to collect in symmetrical figures reflecting the vibrations, thus making sound visible. Chladni named these figures Klangfiguren—“sound figures.” The significance of these experiments from 1787 goes well beyond acoustic physics. As figures of thought they have captured the imagination of philosophers, psychologists, and artists ever since. This fascination does not extend to the scholarship, however. Despite the recent spate of scholarship devoted to sound studies, “sound figures,” as conceived here, have not been examined in and of themselves. Not merely objects of scientific inquiry, the sound figures trace the nodes along which shifting theories of perception, knowledge, and meaning have settled. When Friedrich Nietzsche refers to them briefly in his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” from 1873, roughly a century after Chladni’s experiments, he describes the figures in an allegory of language:

中文翻译：

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声音人物：介于物理与美学之间

实验很简单。恩斯特·弗洛伦斯·克拉尼 (Ernst Florens Chladni) 将沙子撒在玻璃板上，并用弓抚摸着玻璃板。弓使板产生共振，振动使沙子聚集在反映振动的对称图形中，从而使声音可见。克拉尼将这些人物命名为 Klangfiguren——“声音人物”。1787 年这些实验的意义远远超出了声学物理学。从那时起，作为思想人物，它们就俘获了哲学家、心理学家和艺术家的想象力。然而，这种魅力并没有扩展到奖学金。尽管最近有大量的学术研究致力于声音研究，但这里所设想的“声音人物”并没有对其本身进行研究。不仅是科学探究的对象，声音人物还追踪感知理论变化的节点，知识和意义已经确定。当弗里德里希·尼采在 1873 年的文章“非道德意义上的真理和谎言”中简要提到它们时，大约在克拉尼的实验之后一个世纪，他用语言寓言描述了这些人物：