# Hegesh, ‘Mind the Gap’, 2021 > [!cite] > Hegesh, Noa. ‘Mind the Gap: Acoustical Answers to Cosmological Concerns in First-Century B.C.E. China’. *Isis*, vol. 112, no. 4 (2 December 2021), pp. 645–669. <https://doi.org/10.1086/717069>. > [!abstract] Abstract > From the mid-third century B.C.E., Chinese experts used the manipulation of sound as a technology to synchronize society with the cosmos. In the Western Han, the polymath Jing Fang 京房 (78–37 B.C.E.) detected an acoustical problem, known in the West as the Pythagorean comma, in the musical system. In the Chinese system, the comma is characterized by a minute but audible discrepancy, a gap between two pitches that should sound identical and that carry the same numerical representation. Jing Fang reduced the comma by designing a model of sixty pitches, superposed onto the calendar. This essay argues that his acoustical endeavors are inseparable from his ultimate goal: to track seasonal change accurately throughout the year and use it in weather prognostications. Sound was the tool he used to measure the yearly flux of *qi* and interpret what contemporary thinkers had termed the hidden realities and subtle transformations of the cosmos. --- ‘Moreover, in early imperial China, the accurate calculation and distribution of sound throughout the year was as critical a matter as accurately calculating and granting the seasons (*shou shi* 授時) via the astronomical system. According to this idea, measuring sound, like computing a calendar, could result in natural disasters and social unrest if miscalculated.’ [[Hegesh, ‘Mind the Gap’, 2021|(Hegesh 2021, 649)]] ^1f9bd7 ‘These presented sound as a detectable manifestation of qi attuned to the natural order of the cosmos and asserted that sound, like all things, had by then been divided into the two mutually generating categories of *yin* and *yang*—the dyadic principle that governed the cosmos and everything in it.’ [[Hegesh, ‘Mind the Gap’, 2021|(Hegesh 2021, 649)]] ^d4f734 ‘From around the mid-third century B.C.E., Chinese textual sources began discussing sound as a natural phenomenon that could be detected, measured, and expressed in numbers. By the first century B.C.E., authors of treatises had introduced sound as a measurement, with pitch as its unit—packaging the concept of sound together with other measurements such as length, weight, and volume. Sound measured cosmic *qi*, which by then referred to the stuff, or the vital force, from which all things are made.’ [[Hegesh, ‘Mind the Gap’, 2021|(Hegesh 2021, 646)]]