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During the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, one can distinguish two types of polyphony: first, a musical polyphony, which served to demonstrate the superiority of the Moderns; second, a polyphony in narrative and dialogue form that relates to acoustic perception. The central text for demonstrating this transfer from music to literature is a manuscript by Claude Perrault in which he establishes a sensualist discourse for talking about civic emancipation using different rhetorical devices and narrative strategies to prove the aforementioned superiority of the Moderns. The text is contextualized in the later discussion by his brother Charles, then in the satirical literary polyphony used in Daniel Casper von Lohenstein’s novel, and finally in both the otology and the aesthetic taste of the late seventeenth century.