Carl Stumpf was born April 21, 1884 in Wiesentheid in Bavaria. He was strongly influenced by Brentano. As lecturer at the University of Göttingen, he published The Psychological Origins of Space Perception in 1870. In 1873, he became a professor at the University of Wurzburg. His masterwork, Tone Psychology, was completed during a series of professorships at Prague, Halle, and Munich.

He became a professor and the director of the institute of experimental psychology at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1894, where he continued his work on the psychology of music, started a journal on the subject, and began an archive of primitive music.

Stumpf retired in 1921, continuing his work until his death on December 15, 1936, in Berlin. With Husserl, he is considered a cofounder of phenomenology and in particular an inspiration to the Gestalt psychologists.