Turning music into sound: Vincenzo Galilei's contributions to the history of acoustics

Abstract

I investigate the contributions of Vincenzo Galilei (1520—1591), father of Galileo Galilei (1564—1642) to the development of acoustic science, with an emphasis on the role of phenomenology of sound and mathematical explanation of consonances. Sixteenth century music theory mainly aimed at recovering standards of ancient Greek music theory, transmitted by the works of Boethius, and later by Claudius Ptolemy's Harmonics (200 AD). Gioseffo Zarlino (1517—1590), a major exponent of Renaissance music theory, relied on a priori mathematical quantification of sound, which was based on a particular class of so-called Pythagorean ratios. Mathematical properties of these ratios were used to justify a priori the consonance of contemporary music. This clashed with aesthetic perception of sound. Vincenzo argues in favor of the validity of sense perception: perception and aesthetic judgment are explanatory prior to mathematics, and ratios quantify an (undefined) element of sense perception. To prove his point, Vincenzo presented different experiments, demonstrating that the Pythagorean conception of consonance, according to which the octave was embodied by the ratio 1:2, cannot hold for all sound producing physical systems. The study of Vincenzo's experiments in their historical context provide a novel perspective on the relation between the development of scientific inquiry and perception in the history of acoustics.