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The seventeenth century was a period of dynamic discovery in the physical sciences. The studies of astronomy and dynamics underwent perhaps the most noteworthy metamorphoses (see Toulmin 1961:4). In astronomy, the improvement of the telescope by Galileo Galilei provided an alarming confirmation of Copernicus's theory, On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs (1543). When coupled with the laws of motion and the theory of gravitation of Isaac Newton, this shattered man's ideas about the ordered relations between the earth and the cosmos. This paper will examine a series of short essays on various subjects in the realm of musical acoustics by the French theorist Etienne Loulie (d. ca. 1707). A large corpus of writings concerning music was left unpublished by Loulie at his death, was willed to his close friend Sebastien de Brossard (1654-1730), and subsequently donated by Brossard to the Bibliotheque du Roi in 1725. These manuscripts are preserved in three separatelybound volumes in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris - Fonds Francais, n.a. 4686, 6355, and 6356. Loulie's essays on acoustics comprise twenty-seven folios (f. 142r-168v) of Ms. 6355.l They represent a more speculative aspect of Loulie's writings, and include brief discussions of musical intervals, resonance, sound in general, the mathematical derivation of interval ratios, beats, and tuning. Before examining these topics in some detail, it will be useful to summarize the work in the field of musical acoustics of Loulie's contemporaries and of his immediate predecessors. At the beginning of his "Systeme generale des intervalles des sons, et son application a tous les instruments de musique," Joseph Sauveur (1653-1716) writes: I have thus believed that there is a science superior to music, which I have called "Acoustics," which has as its object sound in general, whereas music has as its object sound in so far as it is agreeable to the hearing. To treat this science in the manner of others, especially of optics, to which it bears great resemblance, it would be necessary to explain the nature of sound, the organ of hearing, and, in detail, all the properties of sound, in order to infer from them the causes of the agreement and the disagreement of sounds which serve as the object of music and harmony; and finally the apparatus, not only of music in particular, but also of acoustics in general (Sauveur 1736:403-04).2 With this brief statement, Sauveur not only established a term which could be applied to the study of the phenomenon of sound, but he also laid down certain guidelines for the systematic study of this science. Besides comparing acoustics to the science of optics, Sauveur hints at the three-fold division of the study of acoustics which, later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was to become standard: the production of sound; the propagation of sound; the reception of sound (see Lindsay 1945: xii). There can be little doubt in this and in other writings that Sauveur exerted a steadying influence on the future work of acousticians,3 and that his work represents an important point of departure for subsequent eighteenth-century writers in this field, such as Brook Taylor (1713: 26-32), Leonhard Euler, (1727), Jean d'Alembert (1747: 214-19), and Joseph Lagrange (1759). On the other hand, Sauveur may be seen as the culmination of a century of dynamic discovery concerning the physical nature of sound. Among the Frenchmen who clearly influenced Sauveur's thinking on the subject are Rene Descartes [ca. 1618), Marin Mersenne, especially his Cogita physico mathematica (1644), Claude Perrault, especially "Du Bruit" and "De la musique des anciens" from his Essais de physique (1680), Jacques Rouhault (1671), and Philippe de la Hire (1730: 330-50). Sauveur frequently worked with the last three-named at meetings of the Academie Royale des Sciences, where many questions concerning acoustics were discussed (see Scherchen 1950, passim). …

An Early Eighteenth-Century Discussion of Musical Acoustics by Étienne Loulié