The crisp, bright sound of a stringed musical instrument that exists only in the artwork and lore of ancient Greece has finally been heard again 鈥� thanks to the number-crunching power of latter-day computer networks.
Francesco de Mattia and colleagues at the Conservatory of Music in Salerno, Italy, wondered what an instrument introduced to Greece by a musician called Epigonus in AD 180 might have sounded like. No complete examples of the instrument 鈥� eponymously dubbed the epigonion 鈥� survive, but it鈥檚 known to have had 50 strings, like a harp. It also had a soundboard, like a guitar, but was played without a plectrum.
Using images of the epigonion in artwork, fragments from excavations and written descriptions of the instrument and how it was played, the team developed a 3D mechanical computer model of the instrument. Once they had their best guess at its physical form and the materials it would have been made from, they simulated numerous factors 鈥� such as the instrument鈥檚 mass, stiffness and resonances 鈥� responsible for its distinctive sound. Crunching the resulting complex acoustic equations on a PC would have taken 400 hours, but the researchers instead used two European academic networks 鈥� GEANT2 and EUMEDconnect 鈥� to do the job in just 4 hours.
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鈥淔or the first time we can hear the musical sounds of the past,鈥� says de Mattia, who likens the epigonion鈥檚 sound to that of a harpsichord. His team have compiled the sounds of four variants of the epigonion: hear them at
