The Instrumentarium of Kircher: Premises of a universal Phonurgy

Abstract

International audienceWhether natural or built, rural or urban, outdoor spaces sound. Like concert halls, public spaces have acoustics, which can be compared to the sounding boards of musical instruments. Used to discuss urban ambiances, seminal ideas of a "city-instrument" or urban instrumentarium date back to times when acoustics, which was not yet a science, already fueled the sounding imagination of scholars. The hypothesis of instrumentation supported here argues that the sounds of our environments cannot be studied outside the architectural and symbolic contexts that shape their expression, and hence their understanding. Indeed, the etymology of the word akustike, which means "to hear," reminds us that acoustics is a science that deals not only with properties of production and dissemination of the physical phenomenon but also with those relating to its reception, requiring systematic questioning of the conditions of perception. Therefore, we can argue that the complexity of acoustic knowledge was nurtured throughout the centuries by an auditory imagination that influenced our perception and its space-sensitive impact. Based on these hypotheses, this article explores the extraordinary freedom of the sound inventions proposed by the German Jesuit monk Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), author of the first acoustics treatise in the West, Phonurgia Nova (1673), 3 which was published in the second half of the 17 th Century, a turning point for the advent of modern science. By proposing a new phonurgy, this illustrated in folio 4 book reveals the design of a sounding city, through a series of perfectly situated acoustic experiments, for example the engraving presenting the phenomenon of natural echoes based on a site's topography, or that of artificial echoes triggered by configurations built based on precise dimensions and distances