science. It is founded in physics by the very nature of the matter it
works on. Sound is air in motion. The air is formed of constituents
which, in us, no doubt, meet with analogous elements that respond to
them, sympathize, and magnify them by the power of the mind. Thus the
air must include a vast variety of molecules of various degrees of
elasticity, and capable of vibrating in as many different periods as
there are tones from all kinds of sonorous bodies; and these
molecules, set in motion by the musician and falling on our ear,
answer to our ideas, according to each man's temperament. I myself
believe that sound is identical in its nature with light. Sound is
light, perceived under another form; each acts through vibrations to
which man is sensitive and which he transforms, in the nervous
centres, into ideas.

"Music, like painting, makes use of materials which have the property
of liberating this or that property from the surrounding medium and so
suggesting an image. The instruments in music perform this part, as
color does in painting. And whereas each sound produced by a sonorous
body is invariably allied with its major third and fifth, whereas it
acts on grains of fine sand lying on stretched parchment so as to
distribute them in geometrical figures that are always the same,
according to the pitch,--quite regular when the combination is a true
chord, and indefinite when the sounds are dissonant,--I say that music
is an art conceived in the very bowels of nature.

"Music is subject to physical and mathematical laws. Physical laws are
but little known, mathematics are well understood; and it is since
their relations have been studied, that the harmony has been created
to which we owe the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Rossini,
grand geniuses, whose music is undoubtedly nearer to perfection than