Music and the Literature of Science in Seventeenth-Century England

This chapter explains why music was so important to English natural philosophers in the seventeenth century and identifies the key scientific literature on the subject. In this period the term ‘science’ denoted a body of theoretical texts while ‘experimental philosophy’ was nearer to modern understandings of scientific endeavour, and it is this aspect of musical science that is chiefly focused on here. In his Sylva Sylvarum (1626) Francis Bacon advocated the investigation of music and sound (acoustics), while a decade later in his Harmonie Universelle Marin Mersenne established the musical laws governing pitch and frequency (harmonics). These books had a demonstrable influence on the early activities of the Royal Society, and musical topics soon appeared in its Philosophical Transactions , the first scientific journal to be published. Isaac Newton used his knowledge of Mersenne’s laws to help him mathematise the transmission of sound, light, and planetary motion. Newton also speculated on the division of the colour spectrum into ratios corresponding to the seven notes of the musical scale.

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Literature · Mersenne prime · Musical · Period (music) · Subject (documents) · Computer Science · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Philosophy and Science · History · History of Science and Medicine · Mathematics · Philosophy