The physics of music has fascinated scholars and scientists since ancient times, from Pythagoras' concept of celestial harmony, to the work of Galileo, Mersenne, Euler and Ohm, culminating in the nineteenth century in Helmholtz's definitive work, On the Sensations of Tone. Daniel Chandler Hewitt (1789 1869) was a piano maker who also devised improvements to the seraphine (a form of reed organ). This idiosyncratic work, first published in 1864, only a year after Helmholtz's German text (also reissued in this series in the 1875 English translation), discusses the mathematics of musical...
The physics of music has fascinated scholars and scientists since ancient times, from Pythagoras' concept of celestial harmony, to the work of Galileo...