Mathematics, music, and experiment in late seventeenth-century England

Abstract

The Scientific Revolution saw many subjects given new scrutiny, with attempts to use mathematical, mechanical, or experimental modes of explanation to gain understanding of them. One of those subjects was music. Already a tradition of mathematical study of musical intervals stretched back through the middle ages to ancient Greece, where the emphasis had been on ratios of the lengths of strings that formed particular musical intervals. In the seventeenth century there were new mathematical techniques and new kinds of mechanical explanation that could be applied instead (Wardhaugh 2006).