In spite of the fact that Ampère had devoted considerable attention to acoustics as a young man, and had studied the ways in which the waves of air by which sounds are formed and propagated, he had absolutely no ear for music, and was as tone-deaf as he had been blind before his discovery with regard to the glasses. Musical notes constituted a mathematical problem for Ampère, but nothing more. This continued to be the case until about thirty years of age. Then, one day, he attended a musical soirée, at which the principal portions of the program were taken from Glück. It is easy to understand that this master of harmony possessed no charms for a tone-deaf young man. He became uneasy during the course of the musical program, and his uneasiness became manifest to others. After the selections of the German composer were finished, however, some simple but charming melodies were unexpectedly introduced, and Ampère suddenly found himself transported into a new world. If we are to believe his biographers, once more his emotion was expressed by an abundance of tears, which Ampère seems to have had at command and to have been quite as ready to give way to in public as any of Homer's heroes of the olden time. Blind until he was nearly twenty, he used to say of himself, he had been deaf until he was thirty. In spite of his failure to respond in youth, once it had been awakened to appreciation, his soul vibrated profoundly to all the beauties of color and sound, and, later in life, they gave rise in him to depths of emotion which calmer individuals of less delicate sensibilities could scarcely understand, much less sympathize with.