Emulation of Ancient Greek Music Using Sound Synthesis and Historical Notation

In recent years, several projects in Greece and elsewhere have attempted to reconstruct ancient Greek musical instruments, both physically and virtually, using physical-modeling techniques (Halaris 1992; Tsahalinas 1997; Politis, Vandikas, and Margounakis 2005; Hagel 2007). Moreover, software for ancient Greek music (AGM), particularly for educational purposes, has been designed.

Our current project is a new contribution to the field of AGM instrumentation, because it presents a software application, ARION, that can be used simultaneously as an editor, composing tool, and sound synthesizer for AGM. ARION is the first “instrument” of its kind. Its main advantage is that it provides a user interface that allows users for editing scales, vocal accents, and pitch assignments, helping them experiment with musical forms and scales that have an inherent “fuzziness.”

It is difficult to remain consistent to the source material and to create a user-friendly and historically accurate AGM musical environment, particularly because no one alive has ever heard such ancient music. The only safe route is to follow the work of experts in the field as well as actual musical scores, but even these are usually incomplete. Furthermore, instruments used at the time were very different from modern or even medieval ones. In addition, the true ancient Greek pronunciation—the so-called Erasmian dialect (Devine and Stephens 1994)—is different from Modern Greek, so extended research had to be carried out on authentic vocal reproduction of the lyrics. For vocal reproduction in our system, a variety of techniques for singing-voice synthesis are used, as described later. Singing-voice synthesis is a research area that has evolved over the past 30 years. Different aspects of this interdisciplinary field involve musical acoustics, signal processing, linguistics, artificial intelligence, music perception and cognition, music information retrieval, and performance systems (Georgaki 2004).

West (1992) and Pöhlmann and West (2001) collected and organized a large number of AGM documents, some accompanied by actual music scores, and have given scientific insight into a 2,000-year-old musical system. Our current project uses their work to draw connections between that music and modern Western music using two software modules: ARION and ORPHEUS.

ARION provides a unique interface for AGM realization and exploration. It can reproduce ancient Greek melodies using the sounds of the aulos and the human voice. The application works by mapping and converting each AGM symbol to modern Western music notation; the reverse process is also possible. Users can experiment with various scales and symbols as well, having the total freedom to “imagine” and hear how AGMsounded. ARION also has potential as synthesis software for professional music researchers.

Figure 1.

Singers and performers in ancient Greece.

ORPHEUS is an interactive presentation for demonstrating AGM instruments. The virtual environment of ORPHEUS allows experimentation with modeled ancient instruments. The ancient Greek kithara (a predecessor to the guitar), which was the first modeled instrument, can be virtually strummed using amouse or keyboard, producing the sound of ancient Greek melodies. The application, which is primarily educational in character (unlike ARION), is accompanied by information about the history of AGM and a picture gallery of ancient Greek instruments. Both ORPHEUS and ARION were presented at the International Fair of Thessaloniki during 8–17 September 2006. They have also been presented in international conferences, in nationwide radio broadcasts, and in newspaper and magazine articles.

We provide an overview of AGM, followed by a review of related literature. Next, we describe ORPHEUS and ARION in greater detail. Finally, we present objectives of future work on the project.

Music in Ancient Greece

In this section, we provide a brief overview of music in ancient Greece. Readers interested in greater detail should refer to Anderson (1994), Landels (1999), and West (1992).

General Characteristics of AGM

Research into AGM has revealed that the singer possessed the primary musical role during performance, and the primary melody came indispensably from singing. A musical instrument typically accompanied the sung Greek poetry; ancient Greek poetry and tragedy were inseparable from music (Borzacchini and Minnuni...