ACOUSTICS

ACOUSTICS. When he first mentioned the "Acoustique Art" in his Advancement of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was drawing a distinction between the physical acoustics he expanded in the Sylva Sylvarum (1627) and the harmonics of the Pythagorean mathematical tradition. The Pythagorean tradition still survived in Bacon's time in the works of such diverse people as Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–1590), René Descartes (1596–1650), and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). In Bacon's words: "The nature of sounds, in some sort, [hath been with some diligence inquired,] as far as concerneth music. But the nature of sounds in general hath been superficially observed. It is one of the subtilest pieces of nature" (Bacon, p. 390).

Bacon's "Acoustique Art" was therefore concerned with the study of "immusical sounds" and with experiments in the "majoration in sounds" (p. 451), that is, the harnessing of sounds in buildings (architectural acoustics) by their "enclosure" in artificial channels inside the walls or in the environment (hydraulic acoustics). The aim of Baconian acoustics was to catalog, quantify, and shape human space by means of sound. This stemmed from the echometria, an early modern tradition of literature on echo, as studied by the mathematicians Giuseppe Biancani (1566–1624), Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), and Daniello Bartoli (1608–1685), in which the model of optics was applied in acoustics to the behavior of sound. It was in a sense a historical antecedent to Isaac Newton's (1642–1727) analogy between colors and musical tones in Opticks (1704). Athanasius Kircher's (1601–1680) Phonurgia Nova of 1673 was the outcome of this tradition. Attacking British acoustics traditions, Kircher argued that the "origin of the Acoustical Art" (p. 111) lay in his own earlier experiments with sounding tubes at the Collegio Romano in 1649 and sketched the ideology of a Christian baroque science of acoustics designed to dominate the world by exploiting the "boundless powers of sound" (p. 2).

Seventeenth-century empirical observations and mathematical explanations of the simultaneous vibrations of a string at different frequencies were important in the development of modern experimental acoustics. The earliest contribution in this branch of acoustics was made by Mersenne, who derived the mathematical law governing the physics of a vibrating string. Around 1673 Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) estimated its absolute frequency, and in 1677 John Wallis (1616–1703) published a report of experiments on the overtones of a vibrating string. In 1692 Francis Robartes (1650–1718) followed with similar findings.

These achievements paved the way for the eighteenth-century acoustique of Joseph Sauveur (1653–1716) and for the work of Brook Taylor (1685–1731), Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717–1783), Daniel Bernoulli (1700–1782), and Giordani Riccati (1709–1790), who all attempted to determine mathematically the fundamental tone and the overtones of a sonorous body. Modern experimental acoustics sought in nature, as a physical law of the sounding body, the perfect harmony that in the Pythagorean tradition sprang from the mind of the "geometrizing God." Experimental epistemology in acoustics also influenced the studies of the anatomy and physiology of hearing, especially the work of Joseph-Guichard Duverney (1648–1730) and Antonio Maria Valsalva (1666–1723), that in the nineteenth century gave rise to physiological and psychological acoustics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bacon, Francis. Sylva sylvarum. In The Works of Francis Bacon. Edited by J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, vol. 2, pp. 385–436. London, 1858–1859.

Dostrovsky, Sigalia. "Early Vibration Theory: Physics and Music in the Seventeenth Century." Archive for History of Exact Sciences 14 (1974–1975): 169–218.

Gouk, Penelope Mary. "Acoustics in the Early Royal Society, 1660–1680." Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 36 (1982): 155–175.

Hunt, Frederick Vinton. Origins in Acoustics: The Science of Sound from Antiquity to the Age of Newton. New Haven and London, 1978.

Kircher, Athanasius. Phonurgia Nova. Kempten, 1673.