Sci & Educ (2008) 17:449456

DOI 10.1007/s11191-007-9090-x

From Music to Physics: The Undervalued Legacy of

Pythagoras
Imelda Caleon Subramaniam Ramanathan

Published online: 28 July 2007

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract This paper presents the early investigations about the nature of sound of the
Pythagoreans, and how they started a tradition that remains valid up to present timesthe
use of numbers in representing natural reality. It will touch on the Pythagorean notion of
musical harmony, which was extended to the notion of universal harmony. How the
Pythagorean ideas have inspired many great works in physics, such as those of Galileo,
Kepler and Newton, will also be presented. In exploring the legacy of Pythagoras to
physics and the study of the universe, some valuable insights on the nature of science that
can inspire budding physicists are extracted.
Keywords

Nature of sound
Pythagoras
Music

1 From Music to Numbers

Pythagoras (about 580500 BC), known as the Master Philosopher of the Greeks, started
a tradition that echoes to the present timethe use of mathematics (numbers) in representing the natural world. Pythagoras and his followers are thought to be the first to
conduct scientific investigations on the nature of sound (Dampier 1961, p. 18). Although
no writing of Pythagoras has been found, the work of some Greek philosophers contain
detailed descriptions of his research. According to the writings of Boethius (about 480525
AD), Pythagoras noticed the harmony in the sound of hammers in a blacksmiths forge,
and then found that the weight of the hammers that tend to produce pleasant sounds were,
surprisingly, in ratios of simple whole numbers (Gozza 2000, p. 2). As Pythagoras tried to

I. Caleon
S. Ramanathan (&)

National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 1 Nanyang Walk, Singapore
637616, Singapore
e-mail: subramaniam.r@nie.edu.sg
I. Caleon
e-mail: iscaleon@mail.nie.edu.sg

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recreate what he has observed using several set-ups (e.g. water-filled glasses, pipes, vases),
he was able to invent the monochord, which is composed of a string stretched over a
sounding board with a movable bridge. Using the monochord, he discovered the harmonic
relationships between vibrating strings of different lengths. He found that consonance in
musical sound, that is, having a pleasing combination of sounds, can be achieved when the
string length ratios of the monochord involve the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4. For instance, he
noticed that two stretched strings, whose lengths are in the ratio 2:1, produced the same
note an octave apart, with the shorter string producing the higher note (Lindsay 1945, p.
xii). It is believed that Pythagoras postulated that the ratios applicable to lengths of strings
were also applicable to weights hanging on stretched strings, weights of disks, volumes of
air in pipes or volumes of water in vases (Palisca 2003, p. 262). The experiments of
Pythagoras were depicted by Franchino Gaffurio (see Fig. 1).
Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, went much further, relating their notion of musical
harmony to the order in the structure of the cosmos, believing that the arrangement of
planets follows a musical progression, with the ratio of their distances also expressible in
simple whole numbers (Dampier 1961, p. 17): this is tantamount to believing that the
universe is quantized. According to the Republic of Plato, who is also an ardent follower of
Pythagoras, the Pythagoreans even believed that each of the planets generates a sound as it
moves around the sun, along with the stars in the heavens, although people on earth cannot
hear them as their ears are used to these sounds (Chadwick 1981).
This belief was considered ridiculous by Aristotle (384322 BC), who argued that being
accustomed to a particular sound does not make a person unable to hear the particular
sound anymore, for if this is the case, a blacksmith should not be hearing the sound of his

Fig. 1 The experiments of

Pythagoras, Gaffurio (1492)

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hammer, of which sound he is accustomed to hear (Chadwick 1981, p. 79). The Pythagoreans retorted by saying that only individuals with special gifts can hear the sound of the
spheres, and noted that Pythagoras was one of the gifted beings who were able to hear the
sounds emitted by heavenly bodies, or the so-called music of the spheres (Chadwick
1981).
The Pythagoreans also discovered the inverse square law that was crucial for the formulation of Newtons law of gravity, when they compared the weights stretching a string
while producing consonant sounds. With their belief in a heliocentric universe and the
result of their experiments, they were said to have postulated that the masses of planets
towards the Sun are like the squares of their distances (Gozza 2000, p. 50).
The connection between the universe and musical sounds by the Pythagoreans may be
regarded as absurd, and the authenticity of some, if not all, of their so-called experiments,
can be doubted due to the scarcity or unavailability during their time of some of the
materials that they have mentioned in their writings, but their impact on the subsequent
generations of scientists has been significant. Pythagoreans laid down some significant
findings on the nature of sound: the production of sound by vibrating sources, the concept
of pitch, and the representation of sound by numbers. Their early work on music has
inspired the next generations of scientists not only in their study of the nature of sound but
also in their exploration of the laws governing the universe.

2 From Music to Physics

During the 16th century, the Pythagorean notion of musical ratios was resurrected. Galileos father, Vincenzo Galilei (15251591) a musician and mathematician repeated the
early experiments of Pythagoras (see Gaffurios woodcut in Fig. 1) and found that the
ratios believed to be obtained by him were applicable only to string and pipe lengths, with
other factors being equal (Palisca 2003, p. 263). For instance, Vincenzo found that in
producing notes separated by an octave, the ratio associated with volumes of water in
sounding vases was 8:1 and not 2:1 (Palisca 2003, p. 263). Vincenzos findings challenged
the long-held belief on the Pythagorean harmonic ratios, suggesting that the number ratios
are not absolute, but dependent on the properties of the vibrating sources. (Galileo 2001,
p. 103)
Upon inheriting his fathers records, Galileo Galilei (15641642) conducted further
experiments on sound. Through an experiment involving the scraping of a metal with a
chisel (which bears a strong resemblance with Pythagoras hammers), he established the
direct relationship between the pitch perceived by the ear and the frequency of the sound,
which he defined as the number of pulses of air waves generated by a vibrating source.
In his own words:
As I was scraping a brass plate with a sharp iron chisel heard the plate emit a
rather strong and clear whistling sound I noticed a long row of fine streaks parallel
and equidistant from one anotherRepeating the trick several times and making the
stroke, now with greater now with less speed, the whistling followed with a pitch
which was correspondingly higher and lower. I noted also that the marks made when
the tones were higher were closer together; but when the tones were deeper, they
were farther apart. (Galilei 2001, pp. 101102)
Galileo also described a different scenario when observing the consonant ratio of 3:2,
which is called the fifth by Pythagoras.

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I also observed that when, during a single stroke, the speed increased toward the end
the sound became sharper and the streaks grew closer together, but always in such a
way as to remain sharply defined and equidistant.At times I have also observed
among the strings of the spinet two which were in unison with two tones produced by
the aforesaid scrapingUpon measuring the distance between the markings produced by the two scrapings it was found that the space which contained 45 of one
contained 30 of the other, which is precisely the ratio to the fifth. (Galilei 2001,
pp. 101102)
Although the chisel experiment was very realistically described by Galileo, Daniel
Walker has pointed out that this experiment is unlikely to have been performed:
[We] can see that there is a flaw in the experiment, even if we accept all the facts as
Galilei recounts them. He counted the spaces of the two strokes within the same
distance and found the required ratio of 3:2. But on his own saying he moved the
chisel faster when reproducing the higher note; it therefore traversed this distance in
less time than the stroke providing the lower note, and, if, the ratio of frequencies
was 3:2, should have made less than 45 lines compared with the lower strokes 30.
The experiment could only possibly have produced valid results if he had compared
the number of lines or spaces made during the same unit of time, not within the same
distance. (Cohen 2000, p. 223)
The above elucidation serves as one lucid example supporting Galileos reputation of
having an astonishing intuition that made it possible for him to deduce correct principles
from completely erroneous lines of reasoning (Cohen 2000, p. 228). Galileo surprisingly
produced many correct principles which hold up to the present time, despite the fact these
principles are sometimes based on experiments that are tainted with subtle mental errors.
Another popular principle proposed by Galileo is the law linking change in motion with
force, which challenged the long-held belief on the correspondence between music and
astronomy that was established by the Pythagoreans. Galileo has spurred a new way of
thinking in exploring the structure of the universe when he pointed out that the structure of
the universe cannot be discovered and understood by simply dealing with measurements
of motion, but by dealing with the measurements of changes of motion (Jordan 1992,
p. 136). This habit of thought that Galileo has spurred weakened the link between music
and astronomy because there was no way music theory could posses the sophistication to
deal with changes in musical motion in a way that [was] approximated by the new
mechanics (Jordan 1992, p. 136). It came to a point that merely dealing with number
proportions, which are associated with music, would not suffice to understand the mechanisms of how things, including the heavens, work.
While Galileo was doing his own work on sound, music, and motion, Mersenne independently studied the vibration of stretched strings. He found that a strings frequency
varies inversely with its length (Dear 2000, p. 271). Like Galileo, he also discovered that
the frequency of vibration associated with a particular sound is the one perceived by the ear
as pitch. He actually determined the frequency of vibration of a long, heavy wire, and
linked it with the pitch of a specific note (Sound 2006).
Robert Hooke (16351703), on the other hand, used his mechanical skills to illustrate
the link between frequency of vibration and pitch using a personally designed instrument.
This instrument was composed of a toothed wheel striking a piece of metal at various
speeds thereby producing musical notes of various pitches (Inwood 2003, p. 224).

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Later on, French physicist Joseph Sauveur (16531716), conducted a more rigorous
investigation on the association between frequency and pitch of sound waves. In his book,
Collected Writings on Musical Acoustics (1984), he presented the first frequency table of
musical pitches. He also wrote that the frequency of sound produced by an organ pipe of
about 1.624 m is 100 cycles per seconds (or Hz). This data was used by Newton (1687/
1995) to determine the wavelength of a pulse of sound produced by the open pipe using the
length of the pipe divided by the sound frequency (Book 2, Scholium in Proposition L,
Principia).

3 From Musical Harmony to Universal Harmony

The Pythagorean notion of cosmology, which is governed by musical harmony as
expressed in mathematical numbers, has spurred many thinkers to explore the specific
aspects of the universe that exhibit harmony. They have drawn inspiration from Pythagorean principles, which were considered ridiculous by some of their predecessors and
contemporaries, to formulate interesting theories which are highly regarded up to the
present time.
One of the scientists who took the ideas of Pythagoras seriously is Johannes Kepler
(15711630), who was dubbed as the founder of celestial mechanics for his pioneering
work on planetary motion. He considered the wisdom of the ancients in finding the rules
that characterize harmony in the motion of the planets. He is the only scientist who has
devoted a comprehensive investigation on a mathematical cosmology that applies the
musical theory of the Pythagoreans. He did not believe that the planets and other heavenly
bodies emit audible sound as they move (Gingerich 1992) but he believed that the universe
obeys certain rules expressible in mathematical proportions, reminiscent of Pythagorean
harmonic ratios, which for him are ratios of measurable properties of the universe and not
just abstract numbers (Gozza 2000, p. 49).
Being highly religious, Kepler firmly believed that God had made the universe
according to a mathematical plan that man, being created in the image of God, has the
capacity to comprehend (Field 2003, pp. 3031). He thought it was his duty to understand
Gods mathematical plan for the universe (Field 2003, p. 31). Using the data that he
inherited from Tycho Brahe, a Danish nobleman known for his accurate astronomical
observations based on well-funded research, he explored different aspects of motion of the
celestial bodies, particularly the planets. Notwithstanding the tribulations Kepler was
experiencing due to the death of his wife and children as well as the trial of his mother
being accused of practicing witchcraft, he managed to succeed in finding answers to the
questions that preoccupied him for a good portion of his life (Brackenridge 1982).
Kepler found that the ratios of angular velocities of single planets at aphelion and
perihelion are similar to the musical ratios, e.g. 2:3 for Mars, 4:5 for Saturn (Brackenridge
1982). He also found harmonies in the aphelion and perihelion angular distances of planets,
e.g. aphelion to perihelion angular velocities of Saturn to Jupiter respectively is 1: 3
(Brackenridge 1982). Another significant achievement that gave him great pleasure and
also immortalized him was his formulation of the harmonic law for planets which gave a
neat mathematical relation between the planetary distances from the sun and their period of
motion around the sun (Gingerich 1992, p. 62).
Isaac Newton (16421727) also acknowledged that he sought some inspiration from the
work of Pythagoras. He used the Pythagorean notion of inverse-square law to relate the
distance between interacting bodies and the magnitude of the gravitational force that these

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bodies exert on each other. In the section on universal gravitation in Principia (1687/1995,
Book III, Proposition VIII), he posited that the planets were restrained from flying away by
forces that fall off with the square of the reciprocal distance. He also noted in his book
Opticks (1730/1979, Book 3, Part I, Qu. 1314) that the harmonic proportions found in
music by the Pythagoreans are also applicable to light, arguing that the rainbow of colors in
the visible spectrum progresses in a series of mathematical ratios as Pythagoras discovered
in the world of sound.
Mersenne, an ardent believer of the Pythagorean tradition, looked at music as a proof of
harmony and order in the universe which obeys mathematical laws, relating the motion of
heavenly bodies to universal harmony (Dear 2000, p. 282). He even conjectured that
falling bodies, by virtue of their motion, produce sound with a pitch related to their speed
(Dear 2000, p. 282). This conjecture exhibits shades of the Pythagorean notion of sounding
musical spheres.
For more than 1600 years, the idea of music emitted by heavenly bodies was quickly
dismissed as ridiculous due to the absence of supporting evidence. But modern scientists
have now begun to discover that musical sounds are actually emitted by heavenly bodies.
The earth, for instance, was detected to be humming a tune owing to the oscillations in the
atmosphere, while Venus and Mars are presumed to be doing so as well (Britt 2000). Black
holes, too, were found to be humming a sound 57 octaves below the middle keys in the
piano, presumed to be due to the acceleration of gases surrounding them (Britt 2003).
Recently, the sounds emitted by the sun, which is about 100 MHz (Christensen 2004), and
other stars (Cosh 2000; Travis 1994) were also reported. Many scientists now believe that
the universe produce a variety of tunes inaudible to the human ear but detectable by
scientific instruments (Britt 2003).
Echoes of the Pythagorean musical model of the cosmos can also be traced in the most
current theory that harmonizes all forces in nature by virtue of the existence of a tiny string.
This theory, dubbed as the superstring theory, string theory or M theory, considers a one
dimensional infinitely thin string, with a length of 10 34 m, as the fundamental entity that
gives rise to all other particles in nature, such as bosons and fermions (Veneziano 2004).
According to this theory, each vibration of the string corresponds to a fundamental particle,
analogous to the notes produced by a real string for each mode of vibration (Gefter 2002).
The theory is still in its infancy, dealing with several problems such as postulating the
existence of up to 26 spatial dimensions (Gefter 2002) and so far scientists have not been
able to experimentally verify its claims.
4 Lessons from History
Tracing the development of ideas on musical and universal harmony from Pythagoras to
the time of Mersenne unravels some valuable insights that can provide inspiration for
budding physicists. It illustrates that the ideas of science are often not based on things
that are important at first glance. It also emphasizes a skill that scientists must have: the
power to observe and to find meaning and relations to random events. It also highlights
the importance of having the eye and the mind to look at and interpret things differently to arrive at meaningful discoveries. According to Monk and Osborne: It takes
imaginative and creative leaps of thought to transcend the limitations of commonsense
thinking (1997, p. 420). What appears to be trivial to others may come as meaningful
to the enlightened minds. To a common thinker, the sound of the blacksmiths hammers
or the chisels pitch and vibration will not mean a thing, but to Pythagoras and Galileo,

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these sounds reveal important ideas related to musical harmony and the physical nature
of sound.
Another insight that can be drawn from the foregoing historical account is that the
generation of meaningful scientific concepts can occur by speculating upon earlier observations or empirical results. A scientist need not always start from scratch to come up with
something significant. This approach was demonstrated by Kepler who was among the few
who took the Pythagorean concept of the harmony of the spheres seriously, which links
musical ratios with the movements of the planets. His efforts paid off after many years of
hard work. As also illustrated by other major figures in the history of sound (e.g. Galileo and
Newton), the utilization of the wisdom of the ancients has proven to be fruitful.
In following the lead of the Pythagoreans, it took scientists a great deal of courage and
determination to get to their desired ends as the journey towards their discovery was
arduous. These scientists needed to hurdle several obstacles to get to their research
objectives. One scientist who should be emulated and admired for his strength and perseverance is Johannes Kepler. Starting from the ideas of the Pythagoreans, he arrived at
important discoveries about the motion of planets and their distances from the sun amidst
emotional troubles brought about by loss of loved ones and threats to his mothers reputation and life. He never gave up his quest for answers to questions that perplexed him ever
since he was a student. It also helped him to have the right connections, i.e. with Tycho
Brahe, additional privileges and opportunities that would later help him towards the
realization of his scientific goals. It would be good for budding physicists to note the pains
and struggles that a scientist had to go through to formulate the principles that are now
being introduced in the classroom. With this, they might be able to have better appreciation
of what they now study in their science classes.
The importance of replicating experiments and verifying ideas, which is a hallmark of
the scientific enterprise, resonates constantly when tracing the historical development of
scientific ideas. Vincenzo Galileis efforts during the later stage of his life in repeating the
experiments of Pythagoras and his audacity to challenge a long-held belief is worthy of
recognition. These efforts are believed to have helped his son Galileo to identify the key to
the underlying mystery behind the sound consonance and musical ratios. Highlighting the
importance of such efforts to repeat earlier experiments and verify accepted scientific
principles, which are usually involved in laboratory tasks in schools, may even help in
motivating students to become physicists.

5 Conclusion
The Pythagoreans had introduced a valuable idea that is central to the development of the
scientific enterprise: all complex phenomena must reduce to simple ones. They were able
to forge a marriage between music and mathematics, a link that they extended to the
structure and working principles of the universe. Although the Pythagorean principles may
appear to have lost their utility and relevance after the birth of Galileos new mechanics
(Jordan 1992), these principles, nevertheless, have served as a strong impetus for the next
generations of scientists not only in their study of the nature of sound but also in their
exploration of the laws governing the universe. The Pythagorean principles remain alive as
they are embedded in many revered ideas in the history of physics.
The wisdom of the ancients is a good source of inspiration and deserves a great deal of
respect. It has provided a good starting point for future great ideas and, at times, even
preempted modern ideas. There is much to gain and learn by looking at the past.

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Acknowledgement We thank the Nanyang Technological University for award of a research scholarship
to the first author and a research grant (RI 9/06 RS) to the second author.

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