Jean-Philippe Rameau was one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the 18th century. He replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and is also considered the leading French composer of his time for the harpsichord, alongside François Couperin.
Johann Schobert was a composer and harpsichordist. His date of birth is given variously as about 1720, about 1735, or about 1740, his place of birth as Silesia, Alsace, or Nuremberg. He died after eating poisonous mushrooms that he insisted were edible.
The year 1725 in science and technology involved some significant events.
The Couperin family was a musical dynasty of professional composers and performers. They were the most prolific family in French musical history, active during the Baroque era. Louis Couperin and his nephew, François Couperin le grand, are the best known members of the family.
Robert Smith was an English mathematician.
The year 1757 in science and technology involved some significant events.
The year 1740 in science and technology involved some significant events.
The year 1688 in science and technology included a number of events, some of which are listed here.
Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, son of Bertrand-Médéric and Marie-Rose Moreau de Saint-Méry, was born in Fort-Royale, Martinique He was a lawyer and writer with a career in public office in France, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue. He is best known for his publications on Saint Domingue and Martinique. He married into a well-positioned family which allowed him to expand his connections among French people and in time, positioned himself as a member of the Parliament of France. Moreau was deeply involved in the founding of the Museum of Paris which he was later appointed president of in 1787
The clavier à lumières, or tastiera per luce, as it appears in the score, was a musical instrument invented by Alexander Scriabin for use in his work Prometheus: Poem of Fire. Only one version of this instrument was constructed, for the performance of Prometheus: Poem of Fire in New York City in 1915. The instrument was supposed to be a keyboard, with notes corresponding to colors as given by Scriabin's synesthetic system, specified in the score. However, numerous synesthesia researchers have cast doubt on the claim that Scriabin was a synesthete.
Leopoldo Nobili, born on 5 July 1784 in Trassilico (Toscana) and died on 22 August 1835 in Florence, was an Italian physicist who invented a number of instruments critical to investigating thermodynamics and electrochemistry.
Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet was a French natural philosopher and mathematician from the early 1730s until her death due to complications during childbirth in 1749. Her most recognized achievement is her translation of and commentary on Isaac Newton's 1687 book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica containing basic laws of physics. The translation, published posthumously in 1756, is still considered the standard French translation. Her commentary includes a contribution to Newtonian mechanics—the postulate of an additional conservation law for total energy, of which kinetic energy of motion is one element. This led to her conceptualization of energy as such, and to derive its quantitative relationships to the mass and velocity of an object.
Ignaz Schiffermüller was an Austrian naturalist mainly interested in Lepidoptera.
Theory of Colours is a book by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about the poet's views on the nature of colours and how these are perceived by humans. It was published in German in 1810 and in English in 1840. The book contains detailed descriptions of phenomena such as coloured shadows, refraction, and chromatic aberration.
Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann was a Franco-Luxembourgish physicist and inventor, and Nobel laureate in physics for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference. His parents were French Jews.
The term color organ refers to a tradition of mechanical devices built to represent sound and accompany music in a visual medium. The earliest created color organs were manual instruments based on the harpsichord design. By the 1900s they were electromechanical. In the early 20th century, a silent color organ tradition (Lumia) developed. In the 1960s and 1970s, the term "color organ" became popularly associated with electronic devices that responded to their music inputs with light shows. The term "light organ" is increasingly being used for these devices; allowing "color organ" to reassume its original meaning.
Visual music, sometimes called colour music, refers to the creation of a visual analogue to musical form by adapting musical structures for visual composition, which can also include silent films or silent Lumia work. It also refers to methods or devices which can translate sounds or music into a related visual presentation. An expanded definition may include the translation of music to painting; this was the original definition of the term, as coined by Roger Fry in 1912 to describe the work of Wassily Kandinsky. There are a variety of definitions of visual music, particularly as the field continues to expand. In some recent writing, usually in the fine art world, visual music is often confused with or defined as synaesthesia, though historically this has never been a definition of visual music. Visual music has also been defined as a form of intermedia.
Jean-Baptiste Barrière was a French cellist and composer. He was born in Bordeaux and died in Paris, at 40 years of age.
Ignace-Gaston Pardies was a French Catholic priest and scientist.
Abbé Pierre Sigorgne was a French educator, science popularizer, abbot and theologian. He replaced some of the ideas of Descartes with those of Newton and published a book on Newton's ideas in 1747.
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