ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Greek theories about the physical nature, causes and transmission of sounds, and about some of their more prominent and culturally significant features, such as pitch and volume. The first of its two parts discusses theories which consider what I call “simple” sounds; that is, theories that treat each sound as a single event isolated from all others. Most Greek speculations in acoustics are of this type, but not all; and the second part examines theories about “complex” sounds, acoustic phenomena that we hear as single sounds, but in fact involve interactions between two or more. This part of the chapter falls into three sections, each devoted to ideas about complex sounds of one specific type.
