Music and sound of the 17th Century: Athanasius Kircher and his Phonosophia anacamptica
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the 17th Century many Physicists, Mathematicians and Musicians dealt with the experiences of harmony, music, and sound propagation in enclosed interior spaces. Among them, Athanasius Kircher was one of the most influential researchers of his time. Born in Geisa, Thüringia (Germany), he became a Jesuit in 1608 and spent a large part of his life in Rome, where he died in 1680. During his lifetime, he wrote several books spanning a wide range of topics, including sound, music, and acoustics. One of these, the Phonurgia Nova, published in 1673, was almost ignored for hundreds of years. Phonurgia Nova was translated from the original Latin. It consists of two different books, the Phonosophia nova and the Phonosophia anacamptica. The former deals with the influence of music on human beings whereas the latter analyses sound propagation in enclosed spaces. In this paper, the Authors present new achievements regarding some of the apparatuses that Kircher invented. Among all his marvelous sound machines, the Authors will describe some of Kircher’s items, including the tuba stentorophonica (the “loud trumpet”), the statua citofonica (the “talking statue”), the obiectum phonocampticum (the “phonocentric object”), the Ruota Cembalaria (the “sounding wheel”), the ancient Egyptian singing statue of Memnon, the Aeolian Harp, and the hydraulis (hydraulic organ). Some of these apparatuses were also recently partially realized by the Polish Pavilion during the Biennale of Venice in 2012, achieving a Special Mention from the international jury.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".