“Explanations of all these things”

Abstract In this article the author proposes a new interpretation of what the young Descartes was attempting to accomplish in his Compendium musicae, and of how he went about doing so. His aim, the author argues, was to provide natural-scientific explanations of as many aspects of musical practice, as reflected in Zarlinian theory, as possible. Since the obvious, first-order explanation is often simply that musical sounds—such as the consonant intervals—are a cause of “delight” (delectatio) to the “sense” of hearing, Descartes seeks, and finds, an explanation for that aural pleasure in the (assumed) fact that each of the senses must exert effort in any act of sense perception, and prefers to expend as little as possible. The fact that we enjoy hearing more-consonant intervals more than less-consonant or dissonant ones is thus explained on the reasonable assumption that the sense of hearing (like vision) must expend less effort to perceive, cognitively grasp, and aesthetically respond to objects that exhibit simple proportional relations among their parts, such as the musical consonances with their simple, low-integer pitch ratios. The article situates these assumptions in an intellectual tradition represented by such authorities as Saint Augustine, Boethius, Girolamo Cardano, and Zarlino himself. It further shows that the understanding or theory of sense perception underlying these views is that of the Aristotelian-scholastic psychology that Descartes would have learned as a student of the Jesuits at La Flèche. Descartes's explanations in terms of sensory exertion are thus not only natural-scientific; they are specifically psychological. Moreover, they anticipate a standard research technique of the modern science of music cognition: measurement of subjects’ reaction time (RT) to programmed tasks or stimuli. These two traits of the Compendium musicae, the author argues, foreshadow both the ultimate aim, and one of the investigative methods, of music cognition.