Interested in reading more?

For summaries about Aristoxenus and Greek music theory music theory in general, Wikipedia is a great place to start. However, if you want to do some deeper diving, here are a few articles and books that we're particularly inspiring to me and my project.

Macran, Henry S. The Harmonics of Aristoxenus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902.

The translation and commentary that drove the majority of my project. Without this particular text, I wouldn’t have been able to engage with the source text as closely as I did.

Chalmers, John H. (1993). Polansky, Larry; Scholz, Carter (eds.). Divisions of the Tetrachord: A prolegomenon to the construction of musical scales . Harrison, Lou (foreword). Hanover, NH: Frog Peak Music. ISBN 0-945996-04-7.

This website is an interactive chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the book in the citation. I drew primarily from the 3rd chapter on Aristoxenus and what they referred to as the “geometrization of musical space,” which helped me visualize the divisions of the tetrachord, since Aristoxenus’ words were vague in many cases. It also introduced me to another system that involved dividing the Fourth into thirty parts by Cleonides, as well as fraction divisions of the tone and cents.

Levin, Flora (1972). Synesis in Aristoxenian Theory. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. 103: 211–234.

This was a handy introduction to synesis which is related to sensory perception, but focused primarily on the intuition that we have about music that stems from it.

Barker, Andrew (1978). Music and Perception: A Study in Aristoxenus. Journal of Hellenic Studies. 98: 9–16.

I found that one of the best qualities of this article was introducing the concept of theory being driven by sensory perception and how it contrasted with the math dominated theory that preceded Aristoxenus.