L’antica acustica musicale e la Sectio Canonis: quello che resta di un prodotto della scienza ellenistica

This work discusses the Hellenistic origin of some concepts underlying modern harmonic science. The framing of some ancient works in a long-term perspective allows us to highlight with particular evidence a drastic cultural break, which oc- curred around the middle of the 2nd century B.C., following which important conceptu- al tools for the theoretical modeling of musical acoustic phenomena, such as coincidences, resonances and harmonics, underwent a significant process of fragmentation and decontextualization before reaching the hands of humanists and scientists in the first modern age, to the point of inducing at the eyes of historians an image of the ancient harmonic science as a mere metaphysics dominated by mysticism and numerology.