Apart from being Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei (c. 1520–1591) was known in his day as a virtuoso lute player and a member of the Camerata de’ Bardi, a group of musicians and scholars who sought to restore music to the splendor of ancient Greece. Today, Galilei is better known as a prominent music theorist. He was among the first to empirically investigate the monochord, treating it as a sonorous body, and formulate physical laws about it; for this reason he is often addressed as an early father of acoustics. He contributed greatly to the change in Renaissance musical style by proposing the restoration of Greek music and a diffuse use of dissonances. This eventually will lead to the so-called seconda pratica with Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). The brilliant lutenist Galilei became a theorist thanks to Giovanni Bardi, who sponsored his studies with the most important theorist of the time, Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–1590), in Venice for an extended period from 1561 to 1563. During this time, Galilei became interested in the history of ancient music, even more so than his teacher. Although less famous than his son, Vincenzo Galilei has also been extensively studied by science and music historians, even in recent times [1]. In particular, the role that experiments played in his studies has been the subject of careful analysis and received a wide range of assessments. One of the first works, from the 1970s, is by Stillman Drake, who sees Galilei as the true father of modern science being music the first experimental science [2]. This was followed shortly by a scathing article by Daniel Pickering Walker, who argues that Galilei was not a true experimenter and probably did not conduct any experiments [3]. H. Floris Cohen holds a somewhat more neutral position, arguing that some form of experimentation was present in Galilei [4]; Claude Palisca’s opinion is closer to that of Drake [5]. An article by Adam Fix supports Galilei’s experimental activity but claims that it was not experimentation in the modern sense [6]. Rather, it was a form of knowledge framed within what Fix calls artisanal epistemology. This is more of a sociological category than a philosophical one, though it has some followers [7]. In a recent article, Maurice Finocchiaro reaffirms the validity of recognizing Vincenzo Galilei as an experimenter, albeit not as skilled as Drake suggested. Finocchiaro refers to Vincenzo Galilei not as the father of modern science but as its grandfather, the predecessor to the father, suggesting a cultural link between father and son [8]. Eventually Galilei’s experimental attitude was discussed by Athanase Papadopoulos in [9], where it was compared with that of Christiaan Huygens.

In this paper, building on previous studies, we attempt to clarify the role played by experiments in Galilei’s approach to music by examining all of his works. Most of them has been published and translated into English. There are no known letters from Galilei on music; only those from Girolamo Mei to Galilei are available and easily accessible [10]. We hope to reach a reliable, if not definitive, conclusion.