Archestratus (Ancient Greek: Ἀρχέστρατος Archestratos) was a harmonic theorist in the Peripatetic tradition[1] and probably lived in the early 3rd century BC.
And what one might call the "conclusion" of the theorem – since it is rather sophistic to speak only of the form of a note and thus to leave it as something purely intelligible (noêton) – is obviously based wholly on reason.
Despite the forbiddingly technical and "arid" appearance of the doctrines ascribed to Archestratus, Andrew Barker has argued that in fact "they engage with issues of real significance to musicians, and to anyone seeking to understand the resources and strategies of melodic composition.
"[2] The final section of the passage cited from Porphyry suggests that Archestratus was interested in philosophical topics including definition, matter and form and "the relative importance of the faculties of sense-perception and reason in musical analysis," a topic that had been debated by Plato (Rep. 530c–531c) and Aristoxenus (with whom Archestratus seems to have been in broad sympathy).
91–92 Kemke):[6] Archestratus and his followers, who say that the parts of musical studies concerned with the nature of the voice, the note, the interval and other such things are philosophical matters, are people who should not be tolerated, not only because they have set out on utterly irrelevant theorising, and have babbled about these things childishly in a way that is useless to the science, but also because they are the only people to have declared that the study of these matters is mousikê.Archestratus may have hoped to show that specialized sciences such as harmonics were entitled to the serious attention of philosophers in general, but the schools of Hellenistic philosophy were largely immune to this suggestion.