Ancient musical knowledge came to Just tuning long before Greek music, in Babylonia. It now seems likely that two sources of musical information, were involved in an early tradition of musical tuning by number: firstly, the early number field is the original template upon which musical harmony is based; and secondly, the prehistoric geocentricThe ancient view of the planetary world in which the inner planets orbit the sun and the sun and planets orbit Earth (the geo part). The Chaldean order was Earth - Moon - (Mercury - Venus -Sun) - Mars - Jupiter - Saturn. astronomy which preceded the ancient world had been comparing counted astronomical time-periods, and had discovered the rational tone and semitone intervals between the lunar year, Jupiter and Saturn . Ernest G. McClain identified a harmonic parallelism within ancient texts in which the anomalous numbers found within mythic narratives inferred a unique array (a matrix) of whole numbers, shaped like a mountain, which could explain plot elements, events and characters of the narrative, as intended parallels to such harmonic mountains. McClain’s matrices allowed the author to locate the harmonic intervals found between planetary synods as a reason why religious texts should have employed harmonic numbers, these relating to planetary time as gods alongside ancient systems of tuning. Based on a talk delivered at ICONEA2013, 5th December at Senate House, University College London.
pdf: Astronomical Musicality within Mythic Narratives
