"Starting from the late Renaissance, efforts to make vocal music more expressive heightened the power of words, which, in turn, gave birth to the modern semantics of musical expression.

As the skepticism of seventeenth-century science divorced the acoustic properties from the metaphysical qualities of music, the door was opened to discern the rich links between musical perception and varied mental faculties, In Tuning the Mind, Ruth Katz and Ruth HaCohen trace how eighteenth-century theoreticians of music examined anew the role of the arts within a general theory of knowledge."--BOOK JACKET.