JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1358

[Above:  a gorgeous display of ear bones of humans and animals: reading across the top:  man, cow, hors,e dog, leopard, cat, rat, pig and sheep, coming from Athanasius Kircher’s book on sound and acoustics, and about the first of its kind:  Musurgia Universalis, printed in Rome in 1650.  Image from Special Collections of the University of Glasgow library, and which is the bottom half of the engraving reproduced int he “notes” section^1.]

It seems that almost all of human history’s hearing has been impressionistic–a collection of aural landscapes that would disappear as soon as they were ended, unless of course someone was there to write down what was heard on papyrus or sand or mud or clay or paper.  Finding the sound was important because, well, it was a single-shot phenomenon, unless it was repeated by the presenter, or someone else copied the presentation, or wrote it down so that it could be read and interpreted later.  It was a phenomenal invention of Mr. Edison’s that brought the possibility capturing sound so that it could be played over and over again, the experience becoming a simple piece of technology available to anyone who could afford it.

 The odd thing now is that virtually everything is findable, recordable, archivable.  We can also hear just about anything from just about anywhere.  Before the telephone–invented by Mr. Bell only 135 years ago–in order to hear something from a distance beyond the normal auditory range, a person would’ve needed the assistance of objects such as these “propagation horns” from Kempsten’s Phonurgia nova (of 1673, pictured at left).  Sir Samuel Morland, a fantastic English polymath (1625-1695) also produced an instrument similar to this in his stentoro-phonica, constructed in the 1660’s  It is in a way similar to the giant listening devices devised and constructed by the Imperial Japanese Army in the earliest days of WWII, prior to their use of radar.   Or, if one was a monarch or other highly placed aristocratic or ruling class person, one could have used something like Kircher’s listening device, found again in his Musurgia Universalis of 1650 so that a little eavesdropping might go on from one far-placed room to the next. 
 

[Kircher’s device, below.]

If one were to construct a monument to “found sound” certainly an important element of it would have to involve Pythagoras, who by virtue of walking past a group of blacksmiths heard something in their pounding that struck him deeply, exciting his foundational ideas about pitch.

We see him featured prominently in the frontispiece to the Kircher work mentioned above–well, that and a lot of other symbolism as well.

The blacksmiths are seen at middle bottom, and the man to their left is Pythagoras, pointing to them with a staff, seeming to lean on a marble pillar, but what that really is is a manuscript of his theorem regarding pitch.  reigning over all is a sun representing the Holy Trinity, its rays anointing the earth in the forms of light and angels, the world scene in the center, surrounded by the zodiac and hosting the seated Musica, all representing the ealier beliefs of mathematical/artistic/musical relational proportions, the music of the spheres. [There are other interesting appearances:  musical instruments at the feet of Pythagoras, Pegasus (perhaps?) at the top of the stairs at middle-right, mermaids in the distance, and of course the figure at right, surrounded by all sorts of musical instruments as well as a golden owl.  Of lesser importance but of high interest is the figure just to the right of Pythagoras’ elbow, a figure who seems to be singing, or yelling, or attempting to hear an echo,]

Perhaps the most significant manufactured found sound–in the tradition of Swift and later that of Burroughs and Gysin–was Kircher’s absolutely fabulous  music-making machine, the arca musarythmica.  It was with a device such as this that any person of any (in)sensibility could compose a slightly pre-arrnaged piece of music, combining previously tranbscribed scores together at random to produce a wholly new musical composition. As described  on the Glasgow Library site, the instrument functioned so: 

 

The arca musarythmica is a device by which a non-musician could compose a piece of four-part music using prearranged musical fragments inscribed in wands arranged in columns inside the box. Each type of wand corresponded to a particular metrical unit e.g. 4, 5, or 6 syllables, and on each wand there were examples of florid counterpoint on one side and more simple note-against-note settings on the other. Once the phrase to be set had been analyzed into its fundamental syllabic units, each of these could be set to an example taken from a wand of the appropriate type

I don’t reckon that I’d like the music much (have there been any recordings of anything ever “composed” in this way?) but I sure would like the object. 

Notes:

1.