Abstract: This dissertation investigates the intersection of music and technology in the early modern period. At its heart is a music theory treatise written by the Ferrarese architect and hydraulic engineer, Giambattista Aleotti (1546-1636). Aleotti wrote several treatises in his lifetime on a wide variety of topics including cartography, fortifications, and hydrology, among others. My source for this dissertation is University of California, Berkeley Music Manuscript 1148, which contains a treatise on music (1593), a translation of Hero's Pneumatics, Book Six of Hidrologia, and a treatise on the triangle. A transcription and translation of the section on self-playing organs can be found in the appendix to this dissertation. Ostensibly, the purpose of his music treatise was to teach how to build self-playing automatic organs. But this is not its only interest, for it provides valuable insight into how non-musicians thought about music circa 1600. In Chapter One, I examine Aleotti's life, focusing on his artistic achievements. It is the only biography on Aleotti in English. In Chapter Two, I explore how Aleotti's approach to music was informed by cosmology and number symbolism. In contrast, his discussion of the monochord, based on Lodovico Fogliano's Musica theorica (1529), articulates his bias toward a hands-on approach to sound. Chapter Three addresses the sensory music of the automata that Aleotti created and depicts their use in the garden. The automatic theaters reenacted metaphors of nature and music as well as dynastic struggles and princely magnanimity. In Chapter Four, I discuss the self-playing water organs that Aleotti, as well as Salomon de Caus (1615) and Athanasius Kircher (1650), created. Designing the organs to play with the help of the ruota organica made palpable the metaphor of the clockwork universe. In the end, self-playing organs prompt us to reconsider the effects of mechanization on music. These organs could play with exactitude, yet this is in direct contrast to the concurrent trend toward rhythmic freedom in the secular solo repertory. However, both of these currents point to the artifice that dominated seventeenth century culture.