ABSTRACT
Much of this book has been about attempts by scientists to answer the question: “What is music?”; and when you clear away all the side issues, you can see a trend in their answers. Pythagoras believed we should try to understand music in terms of arithmetic. Galileo and Mersenne argued that the arithmetic wasn’t important of itself, but was merely a reection of the physical motions of sound sources. Then Sauveur and Rameau shifted attention from these motions to the properties of the sounds they gave rise to, and argued that therein was to be found an understanding of the structure of music. Lastly, Helmholtz showed, again, that it wasn’t the sound itself which was important but the way our ears respond to that sound. All the time the center of attention is getting closer to the human brain.
