Joseph Sauveur
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Joseph Sauveur (French pronunciation: [ʒozɛf sovœʁ]; 24 March 1653 – 9 July 1716) was a French mathematician and physicist. He was a professor of mathematics and in 1696 became a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
Life
Joseph Sauveur was born in
In 1681, Sauveur did the mathematical calculations for a waterworks project for the
During the summer of 1689, Sauveur was chosen to be the science and mathematics teacher for the
Circa 1694, Sauveur began working with Loulié on "the science of sound", that is,
Sauveur is known principally for his detailed studies on
divisions:- méride: 1/43 part of an octave
- eptaméride (or heptaméride): 1/301 part of an octave, or 1/7 of a méride; this term would later be known as a savart.
- demi-heptaméride: 1/602 part of an octave; 1/2 of an eptaméride.
- decaméride: 1/3010 part of an octave; 1/10 of an eptaméride
- Also 1/55 of an octave would become known as a "Sauveur comma".
In 1696, Sauveur had been elected to the French Royal Academy of Sciences and most of his work on acoustics was therefore done under its aegis. He soon ran into what proved to be an insurmountable obstacle: the musicians who were serving as his ears and voices had become exasperated at the mathematician's insistence upon using those new measuring units, arguing that they were simply too small for the human ear to distinguish and the human voice to replicate. Furthermore, they did not like the equal tuning he was proposing for instruments, nor the pa, ra, ga, so, bo, and so forth that were supposed to replace the familiar ut, re, mi, fa, sol.... (Sauveur had broken the octave into 3,010 parts.) A break took place circa 1699, and Sauveur had difficulty completing some of his experiments. Actually, Loulié had begun going his own way by 1698, when he published a little book called the Nouveau Sistème, which presents his work with Saveur from a musician's perspective. Loulié's surviving manuscripts round out the musician's contributions to Sauveur's project.
It was not until 1701 that Sauveur presented the results of his research to the Academy. The presentation was studded with jibes about musicians and their closed minds. In this same presentation, he rightly criticized Loulié's practical inventions as insufficiently scientific. In 1696, Loulié had published a description of a metronome-like instrument called the "chronomètre", which Loulié had invented with practicing musicians in mind. Now, in 1701, Sauveur focused on the shortcomings of his former colleague's device, compared with his own échomètre: Loulié's invention was not based on the second, and the swings of the pendulum were not related to one specific note value. In that same presentation before the Academy, Sauveur presented his own monocorde for tuning harpsichords (it was based on an octave divided into equal units composed of the tiny, precise units of his "new system"); and he contrasted his invention with Loulié's sonomètre, approved by the Academy in 1699, which replicated the unequal intervals actually being used in France.
Sauveur, whom a contemporary described as "over-obliging, gentle, and humorless", was declared a "pensioned veteran" of the Academy in on March 4, 1699. He died in Paris in 1716.
See also
Notes
- ISBN 978-0-387-98435-3.
References
- Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. n.a. 4674, Joseph Sauveur's "Traité de la Théorie de la Musique (1697) (his work with musician Étienne Loulié)
- Richard Semmens, Joseph Sauveur's "Treatise of the Theory of Music". A Study, Diplomatic Transcription and Annotated Translation, Studies in Music from the University of Western Ontario, vol. 11, 1987
- Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. fr. 12381, Joseph Sauveur's "Éléments de fortification" written for the Duke of Chartres
- Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. fr. 14737, "Éléments de géométrie par Mr. Sauveur" (used to teach the princes)
- Archives of the Académie des Sciences, Paris, Procès verbaux, vol. 20, February through April 1701 (his work on acoustics with musician Étienne Loulié)
- Mémoires de l'Académie Royale des Sciences (Paris, 1701), pp. 299–366 (his work on acoustics with musician Étienne Loulié)
- Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences (Paris, 1704), for 1701, pp. 123–139, 298–318 (his work on acoustics with musician Étienne Loulié)
- Fontenelle, "Éloge de Monsieur Sauveur", Éloges des Académiciens de l'Académie Royale des Sciences morts depuis l'an 1699 (Paris, 1766), pp. 424–438
- Joseph Sauveur: Collected Writings on Musical Acoustics (Paris 1700–1713); edited by Rudolf Rasch (The Diapason Press)
- French Wikipedia Site; Joseph Sauveur
- Logarithmic Interval Measures by Manuel Op de Coul
- Patricia M. Ranum, "Étienne Loulié (1654–1702), Musicien de Mademoiselle de Guise, Pédagogue et Théoricien", Recherches, 25 (1987), pp. 27–75 (especially, pp. 67–75, on the education of the Duke of Chartres); and 26 (1988–1990), pp. 5–49 (especially pp. 5–26, on his collaboration with Étienne Louliéon acoustics)
- Patricia M. Ranum, "Le Musicien Tailleur: Étienne Loulié et la musique des Anciens", in Louise Godard de Donville, ed., D'un Siècle à l'autre: Anciens et modernes (Marseille, 1987), pp. 239–59 (on the musicians' dispute with Sauveur)
- Adam Fix, “A Science Superior to Music: Joseph Sauveur and the Estrangement between Music and Acoustics,” Physics in Perspective 17, no. 3 (2015): 173–97.
External links
- Media related to Joseph Sauveur at Wikimedia Commons