About This Website

I started website in 2019 because an English translation of Euler’s Tentamen is not available in digital-textual format. It is available in microfilm as well as PDF, but it would be impossible to search for texts without the help of OCR.

To prepare for the Euler treatise, I came across Francis North’s 1677 work, A philosophical essay of musick directed to a friend. This was a short work and was chosen for me to “try out” this web-accessible format.

Although all the graphics and figure (except for the font) was home-made for the North’s essay, Euler’s work contain slightly more elaborated mathematical and musical notation, which I will rely on MathJax, and possibly some other external library.

Principles

Here are some principles of digitization which I follow when I format/edit the works:

• Accessibility.
  • To be the best extent possible, texts must be easily read by a screen-reader.
• Searchability
  • Text must be searchable, while at the same time display ligatures and historical glyphs correctly; for example, “ſ” must be searchable as “s”.
• Authentic Layout
  • Comply to original formatting, where it is apparent that the original layout is not limited by its medium at the time.
• Responsive
  • Readable/Presentable on all modern devices.

Works on Plan to be Formatted

• Euler 33 Euler Archive
• E 314
• E 457

Some Further Plans

I plan to create an edition of some of these works with my personal notes and understanding of the text. This will entail interactive components to illustrate at-the-point.

About Me

I think it’s an obligation to declare my status of knowledge as an editor to readers, as minute decisions in editing / formatting can affect the reader’s impression of the texts.

I’m a Philosophy undergraduate (C/o 2020) at the University of Washington with a minor in DXARTS focused in the Audio/Sound Art. I have not taken any Music Theory classes at the UW, nor any class filed under the School of Music for that matter. This means I don’t have formal education in Music History nor Musicology nor Music Theory.

The courses in DXARTS, the 460-series in particular, offer knowledge in utilizing concepts in Digital Signal Processing, but not the internal workings of those concepts. This means I know what a kernel of an FIR filter is, what phase/frequency modulation is and how to use them, but not how they work.

I have done PHYS 207 (Physics of Music) at the UW, 6 credits of Undergrate Research in Physics across 3 quarters, making SVG illustrations and web tools about acoustics, temperaments and tuning, but I won’t claim expertise on this vast field. If you ask me how to derive a Pythagorean tuning for a diatonic scale, I can do it, but not a chromatic tuning (which is what F. North showed in his essay!).

My knowledge of aesthetics and philosophy of music is even less. I’ve only taken two courses concerning aesthetics: Philosophy of Art, and of Film. Both of which do not have focus on music.

I do not read, speak nor write Latin, French nor German; these languages are used in the original publication of Euler (and other texts).

Musically, I play the keyboard, the modular synthesizers. My musical interests include Baroque and Electroacoustic, but I also enjoy popular music whose genres are too many to be listed here.

I have been a web developer/tinkerer for longer than I have been a proper keyboardist. My comfort-zone is front-end, and the Web Audio API.

Contribute

You can send me an email or file a GitHub issue or pull-request if you found errors in the digitization.

Contact

Contact email: koi@uw.edu

Or start an issue on GitHub repository, at the “Source Code” link below.