What Historic Greek Tune Sounded Like: Concentrate to a Reconstruction That is “100% Correct”

Between 750 BC and 400 BC, the Historic Greeks com­posed songs supposed to be accom­pa­nied by means of the lyre, reed-pipes, and var­i­ous according to­cus­sion instru­ments. Greater than 2,000 years lat­er, mod­ern schol­ars have ultimate­ly fig­ured out the right way to recon­struct and according to­shape those songs with (it’s claimed) 100% accu­ra­cy.

Writ­ing on the BBC web­site, Armand D’An­gour, a musi­cian and tutor in clas­sics at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty, notes:

[Ancient Greek] instru­ments are identified from descrip­tions, paint­ings and archae­o­log­i­cal stays, which enable us to estab­lish the tim­bres and vary of pitch­es they professional­duced.

And now, new rev­e­los angeles­tions about historic Greek track have emerged from a couple of dozen historic document­u­ments inscribed with a vocal nota­tion devised round 450 BC, con­sist­ing of alpha­wager­ic let­ters and indicators positioned above the vow­els of the Greek phrases.

The Greeks had labored out the mathematics­e­mat­i­cal ratios of musi­cal inter­vals — an octave is two:1, a 5th 3:2, a fourth 4:3, and so forth.

The nota­tion offers an accu­charge indi­ca­tion of rel­a­tive pitch.

So what did Greek track sound like? Underneath you’ll lis­ten to David Creese, a clas­si­cist from the Uni­ver­si­ty of New­cas­tle, play­ing “an historic Greek tune tak­en from stone inscrip­tions con­struct­ed on an eight-string ‘canon’ (a zither-like instru­ment) with mov­ready bridges. “The track is cred­it­ed to Seik­i­los,” says Archae­ol­o­gy Mag­a­zine.

For extra infor­ma­tion on all of this, learn D’An­gour’s arti­cle over at the BBC.

Word: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this submit gave the impression on our website in Octo­ber, 2013.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pay attention What Homer’s Odyssey Sound­ed Like When Sung within the Orig­i­nal Historic Greek

Pay attention Homer’s Ili­advert Learn within the Orig­i­nal Historic Greek

Pay attention the Outdated­est Track within the Global: A Sumer­ian Hymn Writ­ten 3,400 Years In the past

Pay attention The Epic of Gil­gamesh Learn within the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an, the Lan­guage of Mesopotamia

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