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Arca Musurgica

Athanasius Kircher was a Jesuit universal genius who, among many other things, wrote the book Musurgia Universalis, which influenced the music of Bach and Beethoven. Particularly interesting to me is the Arca Musurgica described in the book, a kind of automatic, programmable organ that allowed anyone to compose music. It would certainly be intriguing to recreate this on a modern computer.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Music, Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Arca Musurgica”

  1. jbum Says:
    December 14th, 2006 at 12:11 am

    I recreated the Arca Musurgica algorithm a few months ago, using tables published in Musurgia Universalis. You can read about this here:

    http://www.krazydad.com/blog/2006/04/02/organum-mathematicum/

    and here…

    http://www.krazydad.com/blog/2006/04/10/text-to-song/

  2. Martin Winter Says:
    December 14th, 2006 at 9:25 am

    Thanks for the links! I’m definitely interested in the finished Organum script. If I remember correctly, I might even have stumbled upon the Arca Musurgica via your Cuckoo clock entry in the first place …