The Lost Sounds Orchestra is a music ensemble that exists to play only music that has been long lost from the collective memory of our cultures. It seems like a contradiction in terms. But the LSO is an outgrowth of the ASTRA Project, a group which has developed a computer modelling system that allows researchers to generate the sounds that ancient instruments made. So if an archaeologist finds a battered ancient instrument, ASTRA can figure out how it sounded and Lost Sounds can make it sing again.
We spoke with Domenico Vicinanza about the confluence of Web-based computing, archaeology and modern performance. Vicinanza is the ASTRA Project Coordinator and the Lost Sounds Orchestra Technical Coordinator. He also works as a Project Support Officer at DANTE, the organization building and operating GEANT, the pan-European research and education network backbone. Within ASTRA and LSO, Vicinanza leads the team of researchers reconstructing ancient instruments and acts as liaison with archaeologists, musicians and engineers.
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Can you describe the differences, and dialog, between ASTRA and LSO? What are its different goals, what goals do they share?
The Lost Sound Orchestra is the ASTRA project orchestra. It is a unique orchestra made by reconstructed ancient instrument coming from the ASTRA research activities. In other words, ASTRA covers the scientific aspect of sound reconstruction, from the raw data coming from literature and archaeology to the sounds. The Lost Sounds Orchestra deals with the artistic side, it starts from the sounds reconstructed by ASTRA and uses them to play music, organize concerts and teaching music students how to compose, play and arrange for an ancient ensemble.
How much do performances use samples and how much original or reconstructed instruments?
During our performance, our reconstructed instruments are completely relying on digital sounds coming from the reconstruction process. The samples are computed on the European Grid Initiative infrastructure, using the GÉANT network, and then pre-loaded in a laptop connected to the MIDI controller.
What’s the utility, cultural or otherwise, of recreating ancient music?
Recreating ancient instruments which no longer physically exist is a wonderful multi-disciplinary challenge for historians, archaeologists, physicists, engineers and computer scientists. Listening to them is like jumping into the past, into a sound world completely new to our ears.
Much of what defines western European culture in terms of music, philosophy, science and the arts has its origins in the culture of Ancient Greece. Music played a fundamental role in the lives of Ancient Greeks and was almost universally present in society, from marriages and funerals to religious ceremonies, staged dramas, folk music and the ballad-like reciting of epic poetry.
The Ancient Greeks had developed a complex system of relating particular emotional and spiritual characteristics to certain organizations of sounds, called modes (or scales). The names for the various modes derived from the names of Greek tribes and peoples, the temperament and emotions of which were said to be characterized by the unique sound of each mode. Thus, Dorian modes were “harsh”, Phrygian modes “sensual”, and so forth.
Plato, in his writings, talks about the proper use of various scales. To our ears it is quite difficult to relate to that concept of ethos in music except by comparing our own perceptions that a minor scale is used for melancholy and a major scale for virtually everything else, from happy to heroic music.
From a technical point of view, the sound of scales vary depending on the placement of whole tones, they are C to D on a modern piano keyboard, and half tones, which are C to C-sharp. Where modern Western music distinguishes between relatively few kinds of scales, the Greeks used this placement of whole-tones, half-tones, and even quarter-tones (“in the cracks” on a modern keyboard) to develop a large repertoire of scales, each with a presumed ethos.
The first instrument we reconstructed was then a Greek instrument, the monochord. It was one of the oldest and simplest musical instruments, played by Pythagoras. The word “monochord” comes from the Greek and means literally “one string.” In the monochord, a single string is stretched over a sound box. The string is fixed at both ends while a moveable bridge alters the pitch.
After the monochord, we moved to the first real, complex instrument: the epigonion. The epigonion was an ancient stringed instrument mentioned in Athenaeus (183 A.D.), and was a bit like a modern harp or a psaltery. The epigonion was invented, or at least introduced into Greece, by Epigonus of Ambracia, a Greek musician of Ambracia in Epirus, who was granted citizenship at Sicyon in recognition of his great musical ability and because he was the first to pluck the strings with his fingers, instead of using a plectrum. The instrument, which Epigonus named after himself, had forty strings.
Next page: Virtual reconstruction based on modelling
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