Arca Musarithmica

We shall briefly relate how this mechanical music-making is done and, lest we waste time with prefatory remarks, we shall begin with the construction of the Musarithmic Ark.The arca is a box containing a set of wooden rods or slats (or "tariffa" as Kircher called them).

There are different sets of slats which contain musical phrases expressed in a variety of poetic meters (“Euripedaean”, “Anancreonic”, “Archilochan”, “Sapphic” and so on).

Like the previous writings of Marin Mersenne, this work utilizes the ideas of Ramon Llull to show how a small amount of musical material can be combined to produce a prodigious number of melodies.

Kircher goes on to describe the Arca itself, which employs this technique, and includes a fold-out illustration of the device as well as a tables indicating the content of all the rods contained inside.

Up, and by coach through Ducke Lane, and there did buy Kircher’s Musurgia, cost me 35s., a book I am mighty glad of, expecting to find great satisfaction in it.Years later, his belongings, bequeathed to Cambridge, included an Arca.

It has been speculated that Pepy's music teacher John Birchensha was influenced by Kircher's combinatorial techniques, as his own "Rules of Composition" bear some similarities.