Number to Sound

This volume deals with the origin of the modern conception of the object as well as the subject of music - of musical sound as well as man as the recipient of music. This is what music offered to the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. The story is developed in 12 essays written by influential musicologists and historians of science. Starting from the magic of numbers of Pythagorean and neo-Platonic doctrines, the essays lead the reader to 'sound' and 'affections' in modern terms. The conceptual framework that grasps the intellectual shift from number to sound is new, it relates to the ontological change of the object of music to the psychological change of man as the subject (viz., the recipient and beneficiary) of music.