The oldest theory of music wasn’t about taste. It was about what sound literally does to you.
Boethius’s treatise on music, the quadrivium’s standard text for centuries, treated the discipline as the mathematics of proportion applied to sound — ratios between string lengths and pitches were the actual subject, not performance or taste. Building on a Neopythagorean tradition, it held that music’s numerical ratios could correct the “movements of the soul and the body,” treating a well-tuned interval as something closer to a therapeutic instrument than an aesthetic one — the same idea behind the broader belief in a cosmic “music of the spheres” governing planetary motion.
Modern psychological research arrives at a related claim through an entirely different method: music reliably induces genuine emotional and physiological responses — not just perceived ones — through several distinct mechanisms, from brainstem reflexes to learned associations, a finding replicated across measures of self-report, facial expression, and autonomic arousal. The specific mechanisms differ completely from Boethius’s ratio theory, but both traditions converge on the same underlying claim the quadrivium made 1,500 years earlier: that sound and pattern act directly on human emotion and behaviour, not just on the ear.
Source: Panti, C. (2018). “Beauty, Ethics and Numbers in Boethius’ Quadrivial Treatises.” Aisthesis, 11(1). Modern mechanism research: Juslin, P.N., & Västfjäll, D. (2008). “Emotional Responses to Music: The Need to Consider Underlying Mechanisms.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31(5), 559–575.