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Music and the Origins of Ancient Science

Music entered deeply into the making of modern science because it was already a central
element of ancient philosophy. Greek concepts of number and cosmos were the foundations to which their successors looked, even when they turned toward new directions.1 The
ancient Greek word mousik denoted all the activities of the Muses, vocal and instrumental
art as well as the arts of poetry and dance, which the followers of Pythagoras then connected with their teaching that all is number, thereby also implying that all is music. This
fundamental connection between music and mathematics had fateful consequences. Plato
developed what Pythagoreans first named philosophy into a new kind of education that
unified the study of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Expressing the consonance of the primordial musical intervals, integers were separated from irrational magnitudes, setting arithmetic apart from geometry. Yet mathematical ratios shaped the physical
world, as expressed in the mythical story of Pythagoras visiting a smithy: music was the
meeting ground where the first experiments interrogated the mathematical underpinnings
of experience. We retrace these deep connections by recapitulating their historical sequence.
Born on the island of Samos in the mid-sixth century b.c.e., Pythagoras himself remains
so shadowy a figure that everything said about him is controversial. Even by the fourth
century, the brotherhood who deified him had dispersed; modern historians no longer
accept the traditional view that they founded Greek mathematics.2 A century later, a few
fragments remain from the writings of those who came to be called Pythagoreans: Philolaus, a contemporary of Socrates, and his student Archytas, whom Plato knew and admired.3
Philolaus held that all things, indeed, that are known have number: for it is not possible
for anything to be thought of or known without this, underlining the primal status of
number as the inescapable criterion of intelligibility. For him, music takes its place at the
very center of the treatment of number and the cosmos. In Homer, harmonia has the literal
sense of fastening together (the word is used to describe the fashioning of Odysseuss raft)
or a covenant or agreement (such as the compromise Hector proposes to Achilles during
their combat).4 In Philolaus, harmonia has both the general sense of locking together
like and unlike in the cosmos, a unification of things multiply mixed, as well as specifically meaning an octave ( sound example 1.1). He lists more complex musical intervals