The hand of God comes down to tune the ‘lyre cosmique’, a monochord encompassing the music of the spheres, in this illustraion from Robert Fludd’s 1617 encyclopaedia Utriusque cosmi, maioris scilicet et minoris, metaphysica, physica atque technica historia
According to tradition, the first person to identify the correlation between musical harmony and whole numbers was the Greek philosopher Pythagoras. It is said that he was passing a blacksmith’s forge one day, and noticed how all the smith’s hammers made different sounds when striking the anvil. Using this as a starting point, he came up with the idea that sound could be connected to whole numbers. Furthermore, it was also the Greeks who determined the link between arithmetic and ideas of beauty, grounding the notion that numbers can be used to explain the laws of nature, on both a micro and a macro level.
On the face of it, Pythagorean philosophy may not seem to have any connection with violin making, but its principles shed light on various approaches to measurement that are commonly believed to have originated from the makers’ trial and error. his article will show how Pythagorean systems of measurement, connecting lengths with musical intervals, informed the design of early stringed instruments. It also attests to the importance of this way of thinking about measurement, a way that has for so long been buried in the past.