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Sound and Music

Sound arises from vibrations of the air, as may be seen by the vibrations in the water of a musical glass, and by the affections of light bodies, laid on strings in concord; and they may be felt by the vibrations of all instruments. The delicacy and intensity with which they reach the ear, proves the extreme fulness of space in aerial atoms. We distinguish tones when the vibrations are 7,000 in a second, and therefore the particles must be less than the 56,000th of an inch asunder, considering the gravest tone as the eighth of an inch. This coincides, too, with waves of light, which appear, in red, to be the 40,000th of an inch asunder, and in violet, the 64,000th. The lowest tone which the ear can discriminate is, according to some, 12/½ undulations in a second, and, to others, 30; and, the most acute, above 6,000. Every sound is a mixture of three tones, just as a ray of light is of three colors. The union of the keynote with the 5th and 10th, is the common chord. The diatonic scale is the prism of sound. Sound and light, or tones and colors, are produced by two different affections of the very same medium. White light may be decomposed into three colors, and every sound is a compound of three tones. Atoms of oxygen and nitrogen, in conjunction, may produce one, oxygen another, and nitrogen a third, both in light and in sound. One is the excitement of propulsion of atoms, called light, and the other the propulsion of a gross volume, called sound. Every propulsion of the aerial elements, called light, includes, in analysis, the prismatic scale, and every vibration in the same elements, in analysis, produces the diatonic scale. Both scales, too, are chemical, and are produced by the very atoms which produce all our chemical and electrical phenomena. The scales, too, are similar, because they are the measures of the effects on the same sensorium. The numbers agree, since a volume of five parts of atmospheric air is four measures of nitrogen and one oxygen, and every sound is composed of the fundamental note, its fifth and tenth, whose square, or force, is 25 35° in 100, or I to 4. In the spectrum, Young determines the red to be 16, yellow 1, and light blue 23, blue 35, and violet 25, in 100; which for red only would be about 20 to 100, and for the rest, 80 to 100; i.e, I to 4, the exact proportions of oxygen and nitrogen in volume, or 20 and 80 to 100 by weight, and also of tones in a sound. Mere vibration of air would be productive of no variety of tone, if the primary vibrations were not various, and were not accordant, or the contrary. The diatonic scale merely reduces this accordance to the ratio of numbers. Of course, double velocities produce octaves of greater intensity, and then in these we have a second scale, and so on, upward and downward. It is arithmetic applied to vibrations and their effects on the sense.