The Science of Sound-gctid52584

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The Science of Sound Hunter Adams
Through more than 5,000 years of Egyptian civilization, music played a central role in their lifeways. Their numerous instruments - harps, lutes, flutes, sistrums, drums, and horns - depicted in paintings or carved in stone on monuments [Fig. 22], moreover, attest to their knowledge of the science of sound. Their name for sound was "herw" (literally, voice). Furthermore, because music was thought to belong to things that were anterior to experience, this explains why they felt the human voice was the instrument "par excellence."³⁰

The Egyptians were first to formalize the mathematical properties of music. They discovered the laws which refer pitch to the length and weight of the string material. Graphically illustrating this is the plumb bob. The plumb bob, the weight at the end of the plumb line called "tkh," by the Egyptians, expressed everything that oscillates or vibrates. To them, "tkh" also expressed the notion that every vibrating body emits a sound. Thus, the plumb bob was very often modeled in the form of a human heart. The heartbeat also provided them with a convenient measure of time; from its average rhythm they determined the length of the plumb line which would cause it to swing to that rhythm. They discovered the rate of oscillation of a pendulum (plumb bob) varies in inverse ratio to the square of its length, which in this case is 0.69 meters, or about 27 inches.

This mathematical relationship, which results from the phenomenon of classical gravitation, constitutes the essential basis of musical harmony, one of the direct applications of which is the length of a harp string. The longest string emits a sound of a certain pitch. Another string, half this one's length, emits a sound consisting of vibrations twice as rapid, and one octave higher. Thus all the intervals which define the seven notes of the diatonic scale represent the relationship between the stringlengths for any two notes which is the inverse of the relationship between their rates of vibration. Music had a two-fold influence on man in ancient Egypt, one therapeutic, which was associated with the neter (god) Bes [Fig. 23] which dealt with the purely physical sensations and the emotions certain tone patterns amplified or reduced, and the other created or sustained by its trans-material effect associated with the god of psi, Heka (see section on psychoenergetics). In this regard, each note of music had a particular cosmic value.

The Egyptians compared the seven tones of the diatonic scale to the seven colors of the rainbow, and the seven moving stars (planets) - Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon [Fig. 24]. For example, the ratio between the lowest tone and the highest was the same as between Saturn (the most distant planet known to them) and the earth's moon (the closest celestial body to us). This certainly indicates that they had a modal system of music based primarily on the heptatonic and pentatonic system, thounited snakesnds of years before the Greek Pythagorean system of modal music. Thus from the Egyptians' discoveries of the mathematical properties of music, they originated the sublime idea - which subsequently pervaded all antiquity, the middle ages via Kepler, and has even left traces in recent times - the idea of the harmony of the spheres.

Harmony to them was not restricted just to the earth, but was the ruling ethical principle (Maat) of Nature and the Cosmos. To the Egyptians, music (ordered energy) therefore was considered to be the force which regulates the organization of energy into matter coming out of Nun, the primordial infinite ocean of no-space/no-time, bringing into manifestation after the "first time," the entire life process [Fig. 3]. Thus the simple oscillation of the plumb bob, symbolizes their knowledge of the laws ruling the genesis of the universe, the heart, and the breath.

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