Pythagorean Pipe Dreams? Vincenzo Galilei,Marin Mersenne, and the Pneumatic Mysteries of the Pipe Organ

摘要

The pipe organ presented early modern science with a pneumatic black boxrnof suggestive dimensions: while producing musical pitches and intervalsrnthat corresponded with those of an acoustic device like the monochord, piperndimensions approached, but yet confounded clear association with thernbehavior of strings. Nevertheless, investigators like Vincenzo Galileirn(c.1520–1591) and Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) continued to relyrnconceptually upon the monochord and the traditional ratios associated withrnit in their attempts to discipline the complex variables attending the acousticrnproperties of pipes. Thus, while certain conventions of historiographyrnassociate Vincenzo and Mersenne with a “disenchantment” of Pythagoreanrntraditions that ostensibly retarded the development of an early modern physicomathematics,rntheir ratios of pipe scaling reveal instead a robust and evolvingrncontribution of Pythagoreanism to mathematical reading of the Bookrnof Nature.