On the relationships between ancient exact science and musical acoustics

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 occurred around the middle of the second century B.C., following which important conceptual 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 promoting, in the eyes of historians, an image of ancient harmonic science as a mere metaphysics dominated by mysticism and numerology [An expanded Italian version of this article has appeared in Isola (2021b).].