noun: a circle of light around the sun or moon
noun: a toroidal shape ("A halo of smoke")
Ramsay
"The numbers which express the motions of these twenty-five quantities have among themselves nineteen different ratios, or rates of meeting; and when these ratios are represented by the oscillations of twenty-five pendulums, at the number of 64 for the highest one, they will all have finished their periods, and meet at one for a new series. This is an illustration, in the low silence of pendulum-oscillations, of what constitutes the System of musical vibration in the much higher region of vibrating strings and other elastic bodies, and determines the number of undeveloped sounds which form the harmonious halo of one sound, more or less faintly heard, or altogether eluding our dull mortal ears; and which determines the number of sounds which, when developed, constitute the System of musical sounds." [Scientific Basis and Build of Music, page 16]
Of course, when these 25 sounds are heard as they arise in Nature, as a lovely halo of sound clothing one fundamental sound, it is not in the power of the human ear, as at present endowed, to distinguish them all; some ears will distinguish more, some fewer; but the likelihood is that the acute harmonics, as they are sometimes called in the scientific works on "Sound," are all there - at least sometimes - perhaps always; our limited powers of perception being the only defect. - Editor. [Scientific Basis and Build of Music, page 17]
Helmholtz falls into a mistake when he says- "The system of scales and modes, and all the network of harmony founded on them, do not seem to rest on any immutable laws of Nature, but are due to the aesthetical principle which is constantly subject to change, according to the progressive development of taste." It is true, indeed, that the ear is the last judge; but the ear is to judge something which it does not create, but simply judges. Nature is the maker of music in its scales and modes. The styles of composition may vary with successive generations, and in the different nations of men; but the scientific basis of music is another thing. It is a thing, belonging to the aesthetic element of our being and our environment; it is under the idea of the beautiful, rather than the idea of the useful or the just; but all these various aspects of our relation to creation have their laws which underlie whatever changes may be fashionable at any period in our practice. If the clang-farbe of a musical tone, that is, its quality or timbre, depends on the number and comparative strength of the partial tones or harmonics of which it is composed, and this is considered to be the great discovery of Helmholtz, it cannot be that the scales and modes are at the caprice of the fickle and varied taste of times and individuals, for these partials are under Nature's mathematical usages, and quite beyond any taste for man's to change. It is these very partials or harmonics brought fully into view as a system, and they lead us back and back till they have brought us to the great all-prevading law of gravitation; it is these very partials, which clothe as an audible halo every musical sound, which constitute the musical system of sounds. [Scientific Basis and Build of Music, page 78]
See Also
Aura
Field
Ramsay - The Great Chord of Chords, the Three-in-One17