 While it is important to note that the early modern period mitigated the medieval insistence on a mathematical treatment of music with an approach that paid greater attention to its sensory appearance, it would be incorrect to say that the search for mathematical regularities was altogether abandoned. On the one hand, the budding scientific outlook favored the extension of the experimental method to the realm of sound, an operation that obviously included mathematical modeling. Thus, rather than giving up on mathematical descriptions of music altogether, early modern theorists abandoned the abstract framework in which these descriptions had been formulated. On the other hand, accounts of music in mathematical terms continued to survive in the metaphysical speculations of music theorists and philosophers.