The most famous ancient music machine is perhaps the water organ (ὕδραυλις, ὑδραυλικὸν ὄργανον). It is said to have been invented by Ktesibios (Κτησίβιος ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς) in the third century BC and described in his Pneumatics (Περὶ τῶν πνευματικῶν), but that text has not survived. The oldest surviving sources with a technical description are Vitruvius’ De architectura (ca. 30 BC) and Heron’s Pneumatics (Ἥρων ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς:Πνευματικά, perhaps 1st century AD). In Heron’s writing there were also drawings that have survived, through the hands of many copyists, to our day and that were carefully reconstructed by Wilhelm Schmidt in his Greek-German edition of 1899 (See Heron’s page figures 1~3 ). This instrument is called a“water organ” because the air pressure is regulated by water; the pipes, of course, are blown not by water but by air.
As a “miraculous instrument” with a far-sounding tone not originating from a player but from a “foreign power,” the hydraulis was often used in public places. Like the planetarium of Archimedes, the hydraulis symbolized the possession of the highest technology and knowledge, and it was even
mentioned as “more effective than weapons” to demonstrate the power of the Roman empire to the barbarians in a letter by Theodoric the Great to Boethius written in 507 AD.【1】

【1】Reinhold Hammerstein, Macht und Klang, Bern: Francke Verlag, 1986, S. 27-28.

H. G.