Arthur von Oettingen

Arthur Joachim von Oettingen (March 28, 1836 - September 5, 1920) was a Baltic German physicist and music theorist who was born at the Ludenhof Estate in Dorpat, Livonia. He was the brother of theologian Alexander von Oettingen (1827-1905) and ophthalmologist Georg von Oettingen (1824-1916).

He studied astronomy and physics at the University of Dorpat, and furthered his education of physics in Paris in the laboratories of Antoine César Becquerel (1788-1878) and Henri Victor Régnault (1810-1878), and afterwards at Berlin in the laboratories of Heinrich Gustav Magnus (1802-1870), Johann Christian Poggendorff (1796-1877) and Heinrich Wilhelm Dove (1803-1879).

In 1868 he became a professor at Dorpat, where he founded a meteorological observatory. In 1893 he moved to the University of Leipzig, where he remained until 1919 as a lecturer and honorary professor. In 1898 and 1904 he published the third and fourth volumes of Poggendorff's "Biographisch-Literarisches Handwörterbuch der exakten Naturwissenschaften".

Oettingen was a primary advocate of a theory of acoustical relationships known as "harmonic dualism". This concept was later expanded and elaborated on by musicologist Hugo Riemann (1849-1919). Oettingen is also credited for introducing a measurement of musical interval known as the millioctave.

References

* "This article is based on a translation of an article from the German Wikipedia."
* cite book
title=Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought
author=Alexander Rehding
year=2003
publisher=Cambridge University Press
isbn=0521820731
url=http://books.google.com/books?id=HxANIW36CfIC&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&dq=%22harmonic+dualism%22+Oettingen&source=web&ots=m-TGFvAjuF&sig=p0jfMx1kcXS6lCFZYf5amI9rIGY&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result#PPA23,M1