
What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Hear a Reconstruction (2013) - boyter
http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/what-ancient-greek-music-sounded-like.html
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acqq
Original, for those who don't like retold news:

[http://www.bbc.com/news/business-24611454](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-24611454)

Especially when the original is written by the author of the research.

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wobbleblob
German band Corvus Corax recorded a version of this tune.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP-4vF5JYxk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP-4vF5JYxk)

They play ancient and medieval vernacular music on largely self made authentic
instruments. Their approach is that at the time, it was probably played by and
for young people having a good time, rather than professors in music history,
so their shows are loud and energetic.

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pavel_lishin
That was very cool, right up my alley! Thanks for the link.

If you like that, check out Eluveitie's "Evocation" album.

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WalterBright
This is why I'm not really worried about automation meaning the end of work.
The fact that we have automation is what enables people to work on these sorts
of problems, rather than being out in the fields picking bugs off of their
crops and hoping the rains come.

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mercurial
Depends if the gains from increased productivity are redistributed to the
newly unemployed.

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jbssm
It might seem far fetched right at the moment but some thinkers and economists
are already seeing a guaranteed basic income for EU countries during the next
decades which in time should extend to the rest of the 1st world countries.

I know it looks a bit crazy now, but so did free universal healthcare 40 years
ago if you think about it.

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theOnliest
This is not at all new news. We've known how to transcribe Greek notation
since at least the early 20th century (and probably long before that; my
memory of Greek music theory is failing me this morning). This particular
piece is one of Greek music's greatest hits, and has been in standard music
history anthologies for at least 30 years or so, I'd imagine.

It's also not at all apparent that the Greeks used the mathematically pure
ratios (2:1, 3:2, 4:3, 9:8) consistently in real music. One of the earliest
debates in music theory is whether we should trust the ratios or the ear:
Aristoxenus was advocating in the 4th c. BCE for a phenomenological view of
intervals.

(And Ptolemy, whose intervals are supposedly used in this recording, had some
truly bizarre scales in his text. He only allowed superparticular interval
ratios, and so the standard Pythagorean semitone of 256:243 appears nowhere in
his text.)

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YeGoblynQueenne
It's the so-called Seikilos epitaph (I think the name means "Man from
Sicily"):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph)

Interesting historical anecdote, from the wikipedia article:

 _According to another source the stele [inscribed with the song], having
first been discovered during the building of the railway next to Aidin, had
first remained at the possession of the building firm 's director Edward
Purser, where Ramsay found and published about it; in about 1893, as it "was
broken at the bottom, its base was sawn off straight so that it could stand
and serve as a pedestal for Mrs Purser's flowerpots"; this caused the loss of
one line of text, i.e., while the stele would now stand upright, the grinding
had obliterated the last line of the inscription._

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yen223
For those who play Civilization V, the brilliant leader music for Greece is
based on this tune.

