Insight Editions · No. 459
Music and the Power of Sound
The Influence of Tuning and Interval on Consciousness
Alain Daniélou
A complete study edition of Alain Daniélou's Music and the Power of Sound: numbers and metaphysical correspondences, modal versus harmonic music, savarts and harmonics, the Chinese cycle of fifths and the sixty lü, Indian srutis, gramas and ragas, Greek genera, Zarlino and equal temperament, and the universal scale of fifty-three sounds.
A study guide to Music and the Power of Sound: The Influence of Tuning and Interval on Consciousness by Alain Daniélou (Inner Traditions International, 1995; first published as Introduction to the Study of Musical Scales, India Society, London, 1943). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the author's estate or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
CORE CLAIM
An interval is a number, and a number is a principle. Exact intervals therefore carry exact feelings and spiritual effects, and a music that blurs its intervals, as equal temperament does, loses its power.
SCOPE
A foreword by composer Sylvano Bussotti, an editor's note by Daniel Rivers-Moore and 8 chapters: metaphysics, modal versus harmonic systems, measuring intervals, the Chinese cycle of fifths, the modal music of India, Greek music, the Western scale, and a universal scale of 53 sounds.
KEY FIGURES
Pythagoras, Plato and Damon, Bharata, Bhartrihari, Ahobala, Confucius and the Li ji, Father Amiot, al-Farabi and Avicenna, Zarlino, Glareanus, Fabre d'Olivet, René Guénon.
BEST FOR
Musicians and listeners who want a theory of why scales feel the way they do, and readers of Daniélou who want the base of his musical work.
The Book on One Page
First published in London in 1943 as Introduction to the Study of Musical Scales, written in English by a young Frenchman living in Benares, and revised for this 1995 edition. It is part acoustics manual, part comparative history and part metaphysical manifesto.
Daniélou starts from a principle: all music is based on the relations between sounds, and those relations are numbers. Numbers correspond to abstract principles, so music is the one place where physics and metaphysics can be felt together. That is why the ancients treated music as "the key to all sciences and arts". If sounds can evoke emotions, beings or landscapes, it is because of metaphysical correspondences, not psychology.
He then sets out the two great families of music. Modal music relates every note to a fixed tonic, so each interval keeps a stable meaning. Harmonic music, Europe's invention, relates notes to each other through chords and modulation. Both can be expressive, but they need different tunings, and the West's attempt to serve harmony with one tempered scale has damaged both.
The middle of the book tours four systems. China builds everything from the cycle of fifths and its sixty lü, tied to seasons, colors and the fate of dynasties. India builds modes from relations to a tonic and divides the octave into twenty-two srutis, each with its own feeling. Greece had real modes much like India's, but its theorists buried them under arithmetic games. The West inherited fragments, took Zarlino's scale and the major mode as "natural", and then adopted equal temperament.
The last chapter unites the systems. The cyclic series of fifths (number three) and the harmonic series of thirds (number five) meet in a single scale of 53 sounds, of which every real musical system uses a selection.
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Metaphysical Correspondences | Sound as the quality of ether; numbers as principles; music's magic. |
| 2 | The Conflict of Musical Systems | Modal versus harmonic music; fifth, octave and temperament. |
| 3 | The Measurement of Intervals and Harmonic Sounds | Savarts, commas, notation signs and the harmonic series. |
| 4 | The Cycle of Fifths: The Musical Theory of the Chinese | Yin and yang, the pentatonic scale and the sixty lü. |
| 5 | Relations to a Tonic: The Modal Music of India | Gramas, murchanas, srutis, jatis, ragas and times of day. |
| 6 | Confusion of the Systems: The Music of the Greeks | Tetrachords, genera and modes read through Indian practice. |
| 7 | The Western Scale and Equal Temperament | Plainchant, Zarlino, the major mode and the tempered scale. |
| 8 | The Scale of Sounds | Three and five; the universal scale of fifty-three intervals. |
Foreword and Editor's Note
Two short pieces explain who Daniélou was as a musician and how the book came back into print.
Bussotti's foreword
The Italian composer Sylvano Bussotti (Rome, 1989) stresses that Daniélou was "by nature a musician", unlike many musicologists who are, he says, "antimusical". He also calls him a philosopher, linguist, writer, painter and composer. His approach is "completely his own" but "typically scientific". Bussotti urges composers to to explore the "labyrinth of sounds" opened by the book.
Editor's note
Daniel Rivers-Moore (August 1994) tells how the book appeared in London in 1943, in Daniélou's own French version as Traité de musicologie comparée in 1959, and in an unauthorized Indian facsimile in 1969. He found that edition in 1987 and read it on a train from Delhi to Bombay. Through the International Institute for Comparative Musicology in Berlin he reached Daniélou in Italy, who approved a revised, modernized English text. The book is dedicated to Max d'Ollone and Sivendranath Basu.
Metaphysical Correspondences
Music is the meeting point of physics and metaphysics, and its effects come from correspondences, not from the listener's psychology.
Number as principle
"All music is based on the relations between sounds", and the study of those relations leads into "the almost forgotten science of numerical symbolism". Numbers stand for principles, and their application to physical reality follows "absolute and inescapable laws".
Western symbols taken for nature
Westerners believe their sciences are experimental and do not notice that their musical system is symbolic, like their measures of time and space. Daniélou mocks the story of a primitive human who blows into a bamboo and discovers Zarlino's diatonic scale. Thousands of other scales are "perfectly natural and legitimate".
Sound as the first element
Quoting René Guénon, he links the eternity of the Vedas to the Indian doctrine that sound is the quality of ether (akasha), the first element, and to the idea of "creation by the Word" in other traditions. The universe is jagat, "that which moves"; every movement makes a vibration and so a sound, audible or not. The principle of names and the principle of forms are fundamentally one.
Correspondences, not psychology
"All things," Dante wrote, "are arranged in a certain order." Evocation through sound happens "on account of the existence of metaphysical correspondences". The listener's personality "counts for nothing": the evocation would exist even with no hearer. Chords (simultaneous) and modes (successive) work the same way because the number relation is the same.
The magic of sound
Legends are full of musicians who could bring night or spring. Naik Gopal, ordered by Akbar to sing the fire raga Dipak, made the Jumna boil and burned to death. Daniélou cites Western sources linking intervals to the planets: from earth to moon a third, from moon to sun a fifth, from sun to heaven an octave. Five main notes plus two auxiliaries make the seven-note scale, image of the seven planets; twelve (3 x 4) is the measure of the universe and of sounds.
The danger of reform
Disfiguring intervals cuts off contact with spiritual forces, and music's magical effects, "henceforth uncontrolled, can become dangerous". He quotes Plato's report of Damon: "one cannot touch the musical modes without disrupting the constitution of the state."
This music is a terrestrial representation of the music that exists in the kingdom of the ideal world.
Plotinus, quoted by DaniélouA metaphysical starting point. The claim that a listener's mind plays no part in musical meaning is a doctrine, not a finding. Music psychology shows that culture, learning and expectation shape what intervals feel like. Daniélou's point that simple ratios have physical properties of their own (less beating, fused tones) is real, but it does not prove fixed meanings across all listeners.
The Conflict of Musical Systems
The chapter separates modal from harmonic music and shows why each needs its own tuning.
Different systems
Western musicians think their notation can express everything and treat other intervals as curious "quarter tones". Yet music, as the Turkish theorist Raouf Yekta Bey put it, has fixed laws like mathematics; differences between theorists come only from lack of insight.
Two aspects of an interval
An interval is at once mathematical (a ratio) and symbolic and psychological (it awakens feelings and visions). Modern Westerners study one aspect while ignoring the other, "as if the laws of acoustics and those of musical expression did not refer to the same sounds".
Mode and tonic
A mode is a series of sounds with definite relations to a permanent tonic. Modulation is almost absent, because the melody keeps returning to key notes and so builds a "harmonic complex" that gives it meaning. You cannot create a new mode on the piano simply by starting on D or G: the ear hears C major unless the new tonic is constantly imposed, for instance by a drone or drum.
Fifth, octave and modulation
Systems built only on fifths, like the Chinese, are excellent for transposition but incomplete. Daniélou quotes Fabre d'Olivet: Rameau, "more than eight thousand years after Ling Lun", had to adopt "an insipid temperament", which Chinese scholars had rejected twenty times to keep their system pure.
Melodic or harmonic expression
Eastern listeners ask why Beethoven "spoiled the charm of the melodies" with chords; Westerners think modal music is incomplete without harmony. Both miss the other's essentials. The means differ, but "the possibilities seem equal". He quotes an older writer who notes that of all peoples only Europeans use chords.
Harmony is not only European. Daniélou's sources treat chords as a purely European habit. Ethnomusicology has since documented old traditions of polyphony and harmony in Central Africa, Georgia, Indonesia and elsewhere. His real distinction, between tonic-centered modal music and chord-based harmonic music, still holds.
The Measurement of Intervals and Harmonic Sounds
A technical chapter giving the tools used through the rest of the book.
Why ratios
On a string, equal-sounding intervals need ever smaller length differences as pitch rises, so intervals must be measured as ratios, not differences. The major half tone is 16/15, the minor half tone 25/24.
The savart
To add intervals easily Daniélou uses the savart, a logarithmic unit in which the octave is about 301.
| Interval | Ratio | Savarts |
|---|---|---|
| Comma (syntonic) | 81/80 | 5.4 |
| Minor half tone | 25/24 | 18 |
| Greek limma | 256/243 | 23 |
| Major half tone | 16/15 | 28 |
| Minor tone | 10/9 | 46 |
| Major tone | 9/8 | 51 |
| Octave | 2/1 | 301 |
Notation
He adds signs to Western and Indian note names. A + raises a note by a comma; L+ and L- mark notes raised or lowered by half tones of different sizes. So C sharp and D flat are not the same note. Indian names (Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni) run alongside C to B.
Who makes the scale?
He quotes an Indian critic of Western theorists: the theorist's work is "to measure human song to find out its laws", not to invent a scale and ask people to sing it.
Harmonics
Every natural sound contains harmonics, fainter as they rise. Above C come the octave (2/1), fifth (3/2), major third (5/4), the harmonic seventh (7/4, lower than the usual B flat) and the major second (9/8). The harmonic series is the physical basis of consonance.
What to keep. The savart table is a handy tool. Today most writers use cents (1200 per octave), but the logic is the same: you add intervals by adding logarithms, and a comma of about 5 savarts, or 22 cents, is clearly audible in a fifth or an octave.
The Cycle of Fifths: The Musical Theory of the Chinese
The longest technical chapter after India's: the Chinese cosmology of the lü, a scale built entirely from fifths.
The nature and purpose of music
"What we hear is either auspicious or inauspicious; music must not be inconsiderately executed." In the Li ji (Book of Rites), edited by Confucius, music "is intimately connected with the essential relations between beings". Dong Zhongzu ties the human spirit to "the tone of heaven and earth".
Yin and yang
Chinese thought starts from the I Ching, credited to the mythical Fu Xi. The four digrams are compared with the three gunas of India. Daniélou lists the trigram correspondences (Kun the earth: mother, cloth, square, black; Kan the water: pig, ear, secret, thief, music).
The pentatonic scale
The first four fifths above the tonic give the five degrees of the Chinese scale: gong, shang, jiao, zhi, yu. Two more make seven. These are "physical laws and not mere attributions".
The spiral of fifths
Stacking fifths gives twelve sounds, then sixty. Twelve divides the circle like the zodiac, months and hours; sixty gives the minute and degree. The scale of fifths is perfect for transposition and, Daniélou says, for astrological correspondences. The tritone appears after the sixth fifth and was banned in Europe as "diabolical".
The lü and their correspondences
The first lü, huang zhong ("yellow bell"), is the fundamental, tied to earth and the winter solstice. Odd-numbered lü are yang (rules), even-numbered yin (helpers). Each lü has a month, season, color, direction, emperor and animal. With twelve lü and seven degrees there are 84 systems, sixty principal and twenty-four complementary. Different fundamentals serve different rites: huang zhong for the altar of heaven, lin zhong for the altar of earth.
| Degree | Element and season | Social image |
|---|---|---|
| Gong (tonic) | Earth | Prince |
| Shang (second) | Metal, autumn | Ministers |
| Jiao (third) | Wood, spring | People |
| Zhi (fifth) | Fire, summer | Works |
| Yu (sixth) | Water, winter | Material resources |
Pitch and dynasties
A rise in standard pitch, like Europe's in the last two centuries, would change music's influence; Chinese thinkers blamed such shifts for the fall of dynasties. Daniélou defends the audibility of one comma against the French scholar Maurice Courant.
Western commentaries
He rejects theories that Chinese music came from Greece or the West. The Chinese system resembles Pythagoras's, but "if an influence is to be considered, it was certainly in the opposite direction". Western scholars, he says, "juggle facts" and sometimes deliberately falsify history.
History and dates. Fu Xi is a legendary figure, and dates in the fourth millennium BCE are traditional, not historical. There is no firm evidence that Pythagoras learned his scale from Asia; Mesopotamian sources are a likelier background. The correspondence tables are real Chinese doctrine, not acoustic law.
Relations to a Tonic: The Modal Music of India
The heart of the book. India, Daniélou argues, kept the most complete theory of modal music, built on general laws of creation rather than on taste.
Sound and knowledge
"There is no form of knowledge that is not perceived through sound" (Vakyapadiya). Bhartrihari calls the science of sounds "the chemistry of the universe". Music built by marga (sacred) rules has unlimited power.
Modal and harmonic again
The modal system should be preferred when music is meant as education, "capable of creating profound and durable impressions". Indian treatises knew that a mode and a chord could express the same thing.
Sound and vibration
Indian metaphysics, through the Mimamsa school, says air waves are not what we hear: we perceive sphota, the materialized idea, in the form of dhvani, sound. Representing sounds only by frequencies "mystifies the subject by enveloping it in a cloud of mathematicism".
The Vedic and later scales
The Yajurveda names notes udatta, anudatta and svarita. The Samaveda scale is descending, with five main notes and two secondary; the later flute scale is a full ascending heptatonic. Madhyama (Ma) is the old general tonic, the name Vedanta gives to the fundamental sound from which all differences arise.
Gramas and murchanas
The two diatonic scales, Sa grama and Ma grama, differ by one sruti in the Pa or Dha. Modes formed by starting the scale on each degree are murchanas: pure ones use seven notes, others add antara-Ga or kakali-Ni for eight or nine. A third, nondiatonic Ga grama existed in ancient times.
The twenty-two srutis
Tuning two vinas, one to each grama, and comparing them gives twenty-two srutis in the octave, as Bharata describes. Modern scholars called this arbitrary; Daniélou calls it "not only logical but essential" and valid for all music. The vina has seven strings over twenty-two frets; the Hebrew alphabet has twenty-two letters and seven doubles.
Srutis as feelings
Srutis are "regions of the octave", not points. Each has a name and mood, such as Rohini ("adolescent girl, lightning, growing"), Raudri ("burning, terrible") and Dipta ("marvelous, heroic, furious"). Within each region the best tuning is the one with the simplest ratio to the tonic, which gives the 53 (sometimes 66) finer positions. "Although our spoiled ears can no longer appreciate the difference in pitch", we still feel a difference of color.
Comparisons
Avicenna's Arab division differs from India's by one note. Medieval Europe received Indian ideas indirectly, and the gamut of twenty-two sounds and the three hexachords echo the three gramas.
Jatis, ragas and time
Jatis group notes by similar expression. A raga ("passion") is a set of sounds for a definite emotional state, more precise than "mode". Treatises give 72 principal ragas and hundreds of derived ones; Ahobala counts 13,726,560 combinations. Ragas belong to times of day: day (sun), night (moon), twilight (fire). Evening modes keep Ga and Ni; morning modes keep Re and Dha. Ahobala gives the notes colors: Sa like a lotus, Ga like gold, Ma like jasmine.
How a sruti works in practice. Two notes both called "A" can differ by a comma. In Daniélou's scheme the A that forms 5/3 with the tonic and the A of the cycle of fifths (27/16) belong to different srutis and carry different moods. A sensitive singer chooses between them according to the raga.
Contested history. Scholars still debate how ancient treatises such as Bharata's defined the srutis, and many argue they were unequal performance positions rather than a fixed theory. Daniélou's precise ratio tables are his own reconstruction, and claims that Indian theory was "the source" of all modal systems are not proven.
Confusion of the Systems: The Music of the Greeks
Daniélou reads Greek music through living Indian practice and argues that its theorists, not its musicians, created the confusion.
Theorists against musicians
"As usual, the Greek physicists... accused the musicians of being ignorant and obstinate." The criticized habit of "pulling the strings" shows glissando, as in India. The best studies of Greek music were by Arab scholars, al-Farabi and Avicenna.
The theory of the scale
The great perfect system is built from tetrachords around the mese, the middle note "dedicated to the sun", the permanent reference for all others. Greek "low" and "high" were reversed. Daniélou follows Safiyu-d-Din as read by d'Erlanger.
The three genera
- Enharmonic. Western scholars divide a fourth into a ditone and two quarter tones, which Maurice Emmanuel called "ugly little fragments". Daniélou derives it instead from the pentatonic "vocal enharmonic" of the aulete Olympos and reads its small steps as srutis.
- Chromatic. Divisions by Eratosthenes, Didymus and Ptolemy match Indian intervals once read as functional.
- Diatonic. The Pythagorean diatonic corresponds to the Western major scale and the Indian Bilaval.
Modes and harmonies
Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian and their plagal forms correspond to Indian scales, sorted into Sa-grama and Ma-grama types according to where the modal fifth lies; Phrygian and Lydian, for instance, have their tonic on their fourth note. He gives Indian equivalents such as Chhayanat, Jaijaivanti and Gaur-Sarang.
Western singing
Emmanuel's claim that such intervals cannot be sung only shows that Western singers, trained to a heavy vibrato that hides orchestral discord, have lost accurate intonation.
Modes and tones
Boethius confused modal scales with transposition keys ("tones"), an error that misled medieval theory.
A bold reconstruction. Using Indian practice to decode Greek music is suggestive but uncertain. Surviving Greek fragments and recent work (for example by M. L. West and Stefan Hagel) support some of Daniélou's points about small intervals in practice, but most of his raga matches cannot be checked.
The Western Scale and Equal Temperament
The West's scale is a historical accident, and equal temperament has made music vague.
How harmony grew confused
While music stayed simple, players adjusted notes by instinct. As harmony grew, imprecision led composers to thicken chords, which made things worse. Equal temperament then made people "forget completely the most elementary acoustic realities". Imitating noises in music seems "childish" to Eastern thought: music should express essences.
The modes of plainchant
The Gregorian modes are still sung, so they can be compared with ragas: four authentic, four plagal. Example: the second mode matches Todi-type scales; the eighth (Phrygian) matches Kafi.
The scale of Zarlino
Zarlino fixed the "natural" scale of C with ratios 1, 9/8, 5/4, 4/3, 3/2, 5/3, 15/8, 2, mixing major and minor tones.
The major mode
Glareanus, in his Dodecachordon (Basel, 1547), made the major (Ionian) mode basic. It is "no more natural than many others". Read through Indian theory, its intervals express "egotism, vanity, materialism, and the search for pleasure", a frame in which modern mentality "finds itself completely at home".
Equal temperament
The simpler a ratio, the more harmonious; the more complex, the more dissonant. Equal temperament replaces 16/15 or 25/24 with a half tone of about 1.0595, an irrational number. "In the tempered scale every chord beats." He likens it to a wall where no brick is level. He mocks the reasoning that the Western scale is wrong by physics yet must express "some superior psychic law".
Partly right, partly overstated. It is true that in equal temperament only octaves are pure and thirds beat noticeably; many early-music and just-intonation musicians agree. Calling it "musically absurd" ignores what it made possible: free modulation, keyboard music and much of the Western repertoire. The moral reading of the major mode is symbolism, not acoustics.
The Scale of Sounds
The concluding chapter unites all systems into one universal scale of 53 sounds.
A limited set of intervals
"If we collect the intervals used in the different systems, we can see that their number... [is] not unlimited". Relative to one tonic, only twenty-two have distinct significance.
Three and five
Three, the cyclic number, makes the fifth (3/2) and the cycle of fifths. Five, the modal number, makes the harmonic thirds (5/4, 6/5), the sixth (5/3), the major and minor half tones and the comma. Five is the highest prime used in harmonic intervals. The fifth's name is a coincidence of the diatonic count: it corresponds to three, not five, and confusing them has wrecked attempts to explain chord symbolism.
Two series meet
Building four fifths on the harmonic A (5/3) gives E (5/4), B (15/8), F sharp (45/32) and D flat (135/128). Comparing these with the cyclic series shows that the harmonic and cyclic scales have the same number of steps but differ by commas; melodies use them in different orders.
Functional differences
Some intervals sound the same but work differently: the limma (256/243) and 135/128 differ by less than a comma, yet in Indian theory the first is only a difference and the second a melodic step of two srutis.
The universal scale
Figure 17 lists 53 intervals in the octave, harmonic and cyclic, with ratios, savarts and frequencies. Practical equivalences let the comma stand for the Pythagorean comma, the limma for 20/19, the major half tone for the apotome.
Conclusions
No mode uses all twenty-two srutis at once: at most twelve notes, at least three, normally seven. All traditional systems use the same intervals; they differ only in how many they count. The pentatonic is five of the seven, the seven are seven of the twelve, the twelve are part of the Arab seventeen, the seventeen part of the twenty-two srutis, and all lie within the 53, extendable to 60, "beyond which we are no longer within the field of music".
These new laws would give to the composer new powers, and maybe a harmony prodigious in comparison with that which rules music today.
Honoré de Balzac, GambaraWhat to keep. The 53-step division is a real mathematical fact: 53 fifths come within a tiny fraction of 31 octaves, which is why Chinese, Arab and Western theorists all noticed it. Daniélou's nesting of scales gives musicians a single map on which Chinese, Indian, Arab and Western intervals can all be placed.
Master Takeaways
The ideas that carry the book, the frameworks it uses, and where a second opinion is needed.
Master takeaways
- Intervals are ratios, and music is applied number.
- Numbers express principles, so intervals carry fixed meanings in Daniélou's view.
- Sound is the quality of ether, the first element, in Indian cosmology.
- Modal music relates notes to a fixed tonic; harmonic music relates them to each other.
- A mode needs a constant tonic, often a drone, to exist at all.
- Measure intervals logarithmically (savarts or cents) to compare them.
- The comma matters: a comma's error in a fifth or octave is clearly audible.
- China built everything from fifths, tying the lü to seasons, rites and dynasties.
- India's twenty-two srutis are expressive regions, each with a mood.
- Ragas are emotional states tied to times of day.
- Greek theory obscured Greek practice, which resembled India's.
- The major mode is a historical choice, not nature's scale.
- Equal temperament makes every chord beat and blurs expression.
- Three and five generate all intervals; they meet in a scale of 53 sounds.
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Modal versus harmonic | Tonic-centered versus chord-centered music | Comparing traditions |
| Cyclic versus harmonic | Fifths (3) versus thirds (5) | Analyzing a tuning |
| Savart measure | Add intervals by logarithms | Comparing interval sizes |
| Sruti as region | A note is a zone with one mood | Tuning by ear in Indian music |
| Nesting of scales | 5 within 7 within 12 within 22 within 53 | Placing any scale on one map |
| Time of raga | Day, night and twilight modes | Programming or listening to ragas |
On the whole book. Music and the Power of Sound is a serious early work of comparative musicology and still useful for its interval tables and its account of Indian theory. Its acoustics are mostly sound. Its metaphysics (fixed meanings independent of listeners), its history (India or the East as the source of all systems) and its dismissal of Western harmony are speculative or overstated. Read it with a modern introduction to tuning, such as work on just intonation and Indian intonation studies, beside it.
Who's who
| Name | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Sylvano Bussotti | Italian composer, author of the foreword |
| Daniel Rivers-Moore | Editor of the revised edition |
| Pythagoras, Plato, Damon | Greek authorities on number and mode |
| Bharata, Ahobala, Bhartrihari | Indian theorists of music and sound |
| Confucius, Dong Zhongzu, Father Amiot | Sources for Chinese music |
| al-Farabi, Avicenna, Safiyu-d-Din | Arab theorists of Greek and Arab music |
| Zarlino, Glareanus, Rameau | Makers of the Western scale |
| Fabre d'Olivet, René Guénon | Esoteric writers Daniélou draws on |
| Maurice Emmanuel, Maurice Courant | Western scholars he argues against |
Connect it
- Shiva and the Primordial Tradition places sound and mantra within Daniélou's wider metaphysics.
- Yoga: Mastering the Secrets of Matter and the Universe links sound to the subtle body.
- The Way to the Labyrinth recounts the Benares years in which this book was written.
About This Edition
An independent study guide to Music and the Power of Sound: The Influence of Tuning and Interval on Consciousness by Alain Daniélou (Inner Traditions International, 1995; first published as Introduction to the Study of Musical Scales, India Society, London, 1943).
This edition condenses the book chapter by chapter in its own words for personal study. It follows Daniélou's order and gives his ratios and terms as he presents them, but does not reproduce his tables or musical examples. CRITICAL LENS boxes flag claims that later scholarship disputes. Please read the original for its full tables, notation and examples.