The musical studio of Claudio Ptolemy

Abstract

Music is an art with a special place in the technical domain, since from long ago musical performance made use of instruments. From Antiquity to modern era, musical instruments instigated acoustic investigations, and served both as devices for the observation of musical phenomena and as models for representing sound. The article expounds Ptolemy's approach in his Harmonics to the different methods of investigation involved, on the one hand, in the Pythagorean musical conception, with its arithmetical foundation and, on the other hand, the Aristoxenian conception, that puts musical phenomena into the same domain as human faculties like auditory perception and reason, while giving musical instruments a special role from both empirical and mathematical points of view. Harmonica is crucially important in bringing together a considerable part of science of harmonics in antiquity, and also going a step beyond this to expound the ancient conception of universal harmony.