I just happened across this and thought it may interest this group. It
doesn't deal specifically with shakuhachis, but it does deal with sound,
music, etc.:
At 60 years of age, Galileo Galilei, bound by a promise to the Vatican to
avoid promoting the Copernican worldview, published a serious nontechnical
book in Italian, to express for a wider reading public his own take on the
methods and aims of science. That book, The Assayer, is to this day admired
as literature. We offer our own rendering in English of one
parable--personal, witty and warm--published in Florence in 1623:
Once upon a time in a rather lonely place, there lived a man gifted by
nature with extraordinary curiosity and a keen mind. For pleasure, he raised
different birds whose songs he enjoyed. With wonder, he observed how
artfully they were able to form their songs with the very air they breathed,
all of them so sweet. One night near his house he chanced to hear a delicate
tune; not being able to imagine that it was anything but some bird, he set
out to locate it. Coming to a road, he found a shepherd boy blowing into a
kind of hollow tube of wood. As he moved his fingers along the tube, now
opening and again closing the holes that were let into the tube, the
shepherd brought from it airs like those of birds, but even more varied.
Overcome by natural curiosity, the man traded the boy a calf to win the
flute.
Once home alone, he came to realize that had he not happened to meet the
shepherd, he would never have known that in nature there were two ways of
forming sweet song. He decided to set out into the world, looking forward to
meeting with some other adventure.
The next day he happened to pass close by a little hut. He could hear within
it another, similar tone. To satisfy himself that it was a flute, or perhaps
a caged blackbird, he went in, to find a youth with a bow in his right hand,
drawing it across some strings stretched taut on a hollow, wooden box. With
his left hand the young man held the instrument while his fingers played
over it. Without the use of breath at all, the fiddler brought forth diverse
and melodious sounds.
Judge the man's astonishment, you who share his curiosity and see the
workings of his mind. Having now been surprised by two new and unexpected
ways of forming tunes, he began to believe that still other means could
exist in nature. What was his wonder, then, when on entering a certain
temple, he looked behind the gate to see what had sounded only to find that
the tone had come from the hinges and metal fastenings that moved when he
opened the door?
Another time, full of curiosity, he went into a tavern, expecting to see
someone lightly playing a bow across the strings of a violin, only to see a
man rubbing a fingertip around the rim of a goblet, to bring out a pleasant
tone. But when he observed that wasps, mosquitoes and flies formed their
unending hum not, like his birds, by making notes one by one with the breath
but by beating their wings with great speed, he was so surprised that his
conviction that he knew how sounds were made was diminished.
He saw that from all his experience he did not know enough to understand or
even to believe that crickets not able to fly, possessing no breath, can yet
extract their sweet and sonorous calls by slowly scraping their wings.
He finally came to believe that it was next to impossible that there could
be any new way to form tone, having observed not only all these methods but
also organs, trumpets, fifes, stringed instruments of every kind and even
that little iron tongue held between the teeth that in a strange way uses
the mouth as sounding box and the breath as a vehicle of sound. When, I say,
this man believed he had seen everything, he found himself thrown deeper
than ever into ignorance and astonishment when he caught a cicada in his
hands.
Neither by stopping its mouth nor by holding its wings could he at all
lessen its high stridency. Yet he could see no other scaly part moving,
until finally he lifted up the casing of its chest to find underneath
certain hard, thin membranes. Believing that the sound might originate from
their vibration, he undertook to break the disks to silence the song.
But all was in vain, for piercing the insect he took away its life with its
voice, and still he was not sure from whence the song had come. Thereafter
he was reduced to such diffidence about his knowledge that when one asked
him how sounds were made, he freely allowed that although he knew some ways,
he was sure that there must be hundreds of others still unknown and
unimaginable.
It is not hard to find here the Galileo who was the musical son of musician
Vincenzo Galilei, who had himself written seriously about musical theory.
The son's book The Assayer is credited with the first expression of the
concept that impersonal waves in air carry all that is in a vibrating string
over to a vibrating eardrum, personal music played and personal music heard,
but pressures and motions in between.
The loudest sounds made by any insect are the shrill calls of a big, green
cicada that resound through Australian spring evenings. Collaborators David
Young of the University of Melbourne and Henry C. Bennet-Clark of the
University of Oxford have over the years used the instruments and insights
of modern acoustics to analyze the subtle resonators that sharpen and
sustain that cicada's powerful signal. Galileo would feel kinship with
today's investigators and soon, we believe, would come to understand the
system they have uncovered. As it was for him, it is the questions that
drive science to this day, not the answers.
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