Sedley Taylor

Sedley Taylor (29 November 1834 – 14 March 1920) was a British academic, librarian and one of the Professors at the Trinity College in Cambridge, England. He is known for his works on the science of music and on profit-sharing in industry.

Born at Kingston upon Thames, Surrey as the son of a surgeon, Taylor attended the University College School in London, and received his BA in theology in 1859 and his MA in 1862.

Taylor was ordained to a curacy near Birmingham, but withdrawal from active theological pursuits in 1863. He was a proponent of the movement for greater academic freedom at Cambridge. Taylor became a Fellow at the Trinity College in Cambridge, but gave up his fellowship about the same time Henry Sidgwick (1869) and Leslie Stephen (1862) gave up theirs.

Taylor kept affiliated with the Trinity College without a post in College, and expended his research interests from theology, mathematics, physical science, practical economics to preeminently music. In west Cambridge the Sedley Taylor Road is named after him.

In 1873 Taylor published the “Sound and Music.” According to Cyril Rootham (1920):

“Sound and Music,” was... the earliest general exposition in short compass by a writer competent on both sides of the subject. An event which his characteristic energy rendered prominent was his invention of an apparatus which he named the phoneidoscope. It consisted essentially of a resonant cavity, with an aperture over which a soap-film was stretched: when the operator sang to it a note nearly in unison with the cavity, the aerial vibrations revealed themselves visibly in whirling movement of the coloured striations of the liquid film.

Taylor's translated into English Hermann von Helmholtz’s 1862 classical treatise on the sensations of tone. The work was published by A. J. Ellis in 1875, and increased its reaction in Britain "both on the physical theory of sound and on the aesthetic principles of music, which it for the first time brought into detailed, reasoned connection."

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