Quantities or Qualities? A Forgotten Debate about Sounds between Ptolemy and Porphyry

Abstract

In his Commentary on Ptolemy's Harmonics, Porphyry debunks Ptolemy's quantitative theory of pitches by demonstrating that pitches are qualitative attributes of sound. I argue that Porphyry's main concern is to save the phenomenological dimension of sound while preserving the possibility of a quantitative analysis of music. I show how he draws on the Aristotelian tradition to develop a theory of pitches as emergent properties that covary with some underlying quantitative features without being reducible to them. Porphyry offers an original and compelling solution to the classic problem of how to provide a quantitative analysis of a qualitative phenomenon.