Text: Diaphony signified in Greek music discordant sounds or dissonance, as opposed to symphony consonance. But the terms came afterwards to be applied to those first attempts at the harmonic combination of voices, and polyphony, which may be looked upon as the first life-pulse of modern harmony. It is indeed strange that the term diaphony should have been selected for these early efforts, for, crude and painful asthey are to our ears, they gave undoubted pleasure to those who first listened to the; moreover, diaphony was well known to signfy dissonance, intervals being divided into symphonic and diaphonic, the former including 4ths, 5ths, and octaves (and their compounds); the latter 2nds, 3rds, 6ths, and 7ths. The earliest forms of diaphony were of four kinds: when the organum was added to the "principla" or subject throughout at the interval 1) of an octave, 2) of a fifth, 3) of a fourth, 4) at an octave above and below.

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Source: 125