ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores how changing musical practices and acoustic technologies contributed to new medical theories about music’s effects in the early modern period—the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. She argues that there is an intimate and perhaps even necessary linkage between making new music and making new (scientific) knowledge. Put another way, as the nature of music and its organization changed in early modern society, so understandings of human nature and its organization were correspondingly transformed. To modern readers, it might come as a surprise to find these Enlightenment doctors referring to music’s effects on the soul as well as the body. Contrary to popular belief that the soul ceased to be important to science after Descartes, medical theorists continued to invoke this entity as a necessary part of understanding the body’s workings into the eighteenth century and beyond.
