Aristoxenus

Aristoxenus, a Greek philosopher and musician, born at Tarentum in Italy, about 350 B.C. Of the 453 works that he is said to have written, only one, The Elements of Harmony, has come down to us. Harmony, as understood by him, applied only to a succession, not to a combination of sounds, and was connected with that wider idea of symmetry which music was supposed to symbolise. He invented a scale in many respects similar to the modern diatonic scale. Perhaps the most remarkable of his views was that which he held as to the distinction of tones by the ear instead of by mathematical process as Pythagoras had proposed.