Page 11 - January 2009

Fig. 3. The Kircherian Museum.
the Dictionnaire historique et critique of Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) and the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert and in all the other encyclopedic works written during the Enlightenment.
Kircher’s Phonurgia nova
The literary production of Athanasius Kircher is vast,
spanning almost every branch of knowledge, including the theory of music. The title of the literary work analyzed in this article contains the neologism, Phonurgia,1 a compound of the Greek words φovή (sound) and ỏpγή (work, energy). The Latin word nova (the entire book was written in Latin) is added, and the title translates as New Modality of Sound Production. In the Explicatio terminorum (explanatory words) on the last page of the Phonurgia nova, Kircher him- self defines “Phonurgia as Facultas mirabilium per sonos oper- atrix,” meaning “capability to provoke the marvelous by means of sounds.”
This treatise was written during the dispute with the contemporary English engineer Samuel Morland,2 who claimed responsibility for the invention of the tuba stentoro- phonica, a “trumpet with a strong sound.” This musical instrument aroused great interest among many contempo- rary scientists, due to its incredible sound emission potential. Kircher declared that he was the first to have invented it and provided the evidence for this claim in his Musurgia
Universalis,3 written twenty years previously. In this work he had already described the “tuba.” Besides, the polemical intention of Kircher’s Phonurgia nova expresses a wish to enrich and widen already existing knowledge in the field of room and musical acoustics. The Phonurgia nova is an origi- nal mixture of Baroque aesthetics and sonic enquiry that could be called in Italian, “meraviglia,” or in English, “won- der,” and yet only a few studies of this fascinating work exist.
After an initial humanistic subordination to classical sources, in the last decades of the 16th Century the growing scientific revolution imposed a radical turning point: the rediscovery of the conic section and the study of the burning glasses of Archimedes, the study of sound propagation advanced from a wave approach to that of ray-tracing, as related to light.
The Venetian Ettore Ausonio began the geometric approach to acoustics, soon followed by Giovanni Battista Della Porta (who wrote the Magia naturalis, Napoli, 1589) and by Giuseppe Biancani (author of a Sphaera mundi, Bologna, 1635), focusing on sound and modifying the musi- cal scale. The first mathematic development along such lines was due to Bonaventura Cavalieri (De speculo ustorio, Bologna, 1632), who was the first to affirm that “...for the sound (instead of to rays of light) during the design, it is nec- essary to take into account a phenomenon called, in the opti- cal field, diffraction.”
The study of the musical world, based on exact laws of physics, interested a large section of eighteenth-century sci- ence and culture. Kircher, for his part, revealed a logical, rational approach towards any occurrence of musical phe- nomenon.
In chapter one of the first book of Phonurgia nova, Kircher tackles the problem of the nature of sound. It is defined as a sensitive phenomenon that is perceived by hear- ing. It is a movement of bodies that are in contact with each other by means of a portion of air interposed among them. For the Jesuit, therefore, the movement of bodies was the fundamental presupposition of every acoustic manifestation.
Kircher’s definition of sound is based on Aristotle and Boethius. Aristotle defined sound as “a determined move- ment from two bodies that crash one against the other” (Musurgia Universalis); Boethius, similarly, believed that the sound was a movement that broke the air up and afterwards reached the ear.
For Kircher, however, sound was not simply a physical phenomenon, as it was for the two aforementioned authors, but also something that was deeply connected with human nature. Kircher’s conception of sound was not yet influenced by the modern theory of oscillations, which was formulated later thanks to the researches of Galilei and Newton, but it already considered the deep relationship between the num- ber of the oscillations (frequency) and the pitch of the sound.
The Phonurgia nova is subdivided in two books. The Phonosophia nova is the more anthropological: in which Kircher analysed the influences of music on the human mind, inclined towards various types of “affections.” He also developed the concept that the art of sound making can be used effectively for therapeutic purposes. A remarkable example of this is the “tarantolati,” people who were bitten by
10 Acoustics Today, January 2009