ABSTRACT
Publications certainly continued to appear concerned with music from mathematical and mechanical points of view. The mechanical study of music also throve in the eighteenth century, but at the same time it underwent more drastic evolution. In 1714, Brooke Taylor, in effect, solved the differential equation for the vibrating string, and he published predictions about its behaviour. Taylor is an intriguing individual, as he was involved in both of these divergent strands of the study of music. Music had been a branch of mathematics for centuries, and it was one of only a small handful of subjects for which explicit mathematical laws existed before the second half of the seventeenth century. The seventeenth-century 're-mathematisation' of music applied novel mathematical tools – decimals and logarithms – to the study of pitch.
