What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Hear a Reconstruction That is ‘100% Accurate’

1what_greek_music_sounded_like

Between 750 BC and 400 BC, the Ancient Greeks com­posed songs meant to be accom­pa­nied by the lyre, reed-pipes, and var­i­ous per­cus­sion instru­ments. More than 2,000 years lat­er, mod­ern schol­ars have final­ly fig­ured out how to recon­struct and per­form these songs with (it’s claimed) 100% accu­ra­cy.

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

[Ancient Greek] instru­ments are known from descrip­tions, paint­ings and archae­o­log­i­cal remains, which allow us to estab­lish the tim­bres and range of pitch­es they pro­duced.

And now, new rev­e­la­tions about ancient Greek music have emerged from a few dozen ancient doc­u­ments inscribed with a vocal nota­tion devised around 450 BC, con­sist­ing of alpha­bet­ic let­ters and signs placed above the vow­els of the Greek words.

The Greeks had worked out the math­e­mat­i­cal ratios of musi­cal inter­vals — an octave is 2:1, a fifth 3:2, a fourth 4:3, and so on.

The nota­tion gives an accu­rate indi­ca­tion of rel­a­tive pitch.

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

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

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

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The His­to­ry of West­ern Archi­tec­ture: From Ancient Greece to Roco­co (A Free Online Course)

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Comments (89)
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  • ThornyBleeder says:

    very cool. kin­da’ sounds like Black Eyed Dog by Nick Drake.

  • Dellu says:

    is this instru­ment sim­i­lar to the Nubians/Ethiopians kissar?

    • Bruno Coon says:

      Well, it’s worth men­tion­ing that there is a mod­ern instru­ment, the kanun or qanun which is a zither with mov­able bridges and is the name is the ara­bic ver­sion of the “canon“n, or “the law” in music

  • Alan says:

    Sounds like the sound­track to Cora­line.

  • Lara says:

    sor­ry, but the singing voice has a for­eign accent, not an ancient Greek accent. Oth­er than that thanks for the upload.

    • psmurph says:

      Picky, picky!nSome of us weren’t there and don’t care about ‘accents’.

    • Kaddy says:

      How in the world do you know what an ancient Greek accent was like? I’m not being face­tious, I’d real­ly like to know.

      • Niman says:

        The ‘t’s are pro­nounced in an Eng­lish way which is very dif­fer­ent from the ‘t’ in greek. Thats prob­a­bly where the com­plaint is based

        • Kaddy says:

          I under­stand that this accent may not match mod­ern Greek. My ques­tion is, how do we know what ANCIENT Greek sound­ed like? Eng­lish today bears lit­tle resem­blance to Old Eng­lish and all attempts to sug­gest what Old, or even Mid­dle, Eng­lish sound­ed like are con­jec­ture. Would this not also be true for ancient Greek?

          • AliG says:

            I’m no expert on the sub­ject but was born bilin­gual to these lan­guages.. Despite your well found­ed ‘con­jec­ture’, on the bal­ance of prob­a­bil­i­ties the pro­nun­ci­a­tion of TA would be sim­i­lar to mod­ern Greek, faaar­rr farr more so than mod­ern Eng­lish.
            Search ‘Katharevousa’ this was the most recent reform of our lan­guage.

            Hap­py read­ing.

            Peace & Love!

          • Kat says:

            wait, why are you read­ing an arti­cle about what ancient music sound­ed like if you don’t even believe we know what ancient accents sound­ed like? they’re based on the same basic prin­ci­ple.

          • Kaddy says:

            No they’re not. I’m a musi­cian and I under­stand nota­tion and scales. Lan­guage, although close­ly relat­ed to music in the devel­op­ment of humankind appears to have evolved some­what dif­fer­ent­ly, if I under­stand what I have read recent­ly from var­i­ous sources. nnnI did­n’t say we did­n’t know what ancient accents sound­ed like, I ASKED how we know, in order to learn. It doss­n’t make a lot of sense to read arti­cles about what I already know if I want to learn new things, does it?

          • Kaddy says:

            Fur­ther, through dis­cus­sion and a series of ques­tions, I now have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how lin­guists deter­mine these sounds. Which means, thanks to the very knowl­edge­able peo­ple who took time to explain, I know more now than I did before I asked questions.You, on the oth­er hand, only ques­tioned my right to be inquis­i­tive.

          • Dana says:

            Ancient accents did­n’t come with notation.nnnThat said, this ques­tion was answered else­where, and much bet­ter.

      • leoboiko says:

        There are ways. You start from the mod­ern lan­guage, then com­pare all dialects and vari­a­tions, and com­pare that to the sounds of Greek loans into oth­er lan­guages, and ana­lyze the orto­graph­ic “errors” of peo­ple from var­i­ous ages and oth­er philo­log­i­cal data, and com­pare with the descrip­tions of the ancients of how they pro­nounced sounds, and fit all that into what is known about sound-chang­ing ten­den­cies in nat­ur­al languagesu2026nnIf you’re curi­ous about this top­ic I rec­om­mend this book as an intro­duc­tion: http://www.amazon.com/The-Horse-Wheel-Language-Bronze-Age/dp/069114818XnIt describes in plain lan­guage how lin­guists can infer, with rea­son­able cer­tain­ty, the sounds of a lan­guage even old­er than Ancient Greek, and worse, with­out writ­ten records: The ances­tor to most Euro­pean and Hin­di lan­guages, Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean.

      • leoboiko says:

        There are ways. You start from the mod­ern lan­guage, then com­pare all dialects and vari­a­tions, and com­pare that to the sounds of Greek loans into oth­er lan­guages, and ana­lyze the orto­graph­ic “errors” of peo­ple from var­i­ous ages and oth­er philo­log­i­cal data, and com­pare with the descrip­tions of the ancients of how they pro­nounced sounds, and fit all that into what is known about sound-chang­ing ten­den­cies in nat­ur­al languagesu2026nnIf you’re curi­ous about this top­ic I rec­om­mend this book as an intro­duc­tion: http://www.amazon.com/The-Horse-Wheel-Language-Bronze-Age/dp/069114818XnIt describes in plain lan­guage how lin­guists can infer, with rea­son­able cer­tain­ty, the sounds of a lan­guage even old­er than Ancient Greek, and worse, with­out writ­ten records: The ances­tor to most Euro­pean and Hin­di lan­guages, Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean.

        • Kaddy says:

          Thank you very much. I am fas­ci­nat­ed by lan­guage and how they evolved u2013 indeed, in the very ori­gins of lan­guage. I will def­i­nite­ly look into this book.

    • Dana says:

      Right, because we have a ready sup­ply of native Ancient Greek speak­ers to choose from.

  • GTFOofNOLA says:

    Reminds me of Rush — 2112 iii Dis­cov­ery

  • psmurph says:

    …leaves me want­i­ng more.

  • James says:

    I’m scep­ti­cal of the tun­ing (this after tak­ing grad­u­ate-lev­el class­es on ancient Greek music the­o­ry). Also, this record­ing does­n’t reflect a recent, dra­mat­ic dis­cov­ery. This is the Seik­i­los Epi­taph which has been in the Nor­ton Anthol­o­gy of West­ern Music for decades. It is writ­ten on a tomb­stone. Music for Greek dra­mas was not writ­ten on stone so very few frag­ments sur­vive. Though Greek music nota­tion was pre­cise about notes and rhythms, you nev­er know exact­ly how it would have sound­ed, and that’s kind of mean­ing­less any­way.

  • balthasar999 says:

    No won­der they kept refer­ring to it as “sweet.” I would total­ly sip wine and spec­u­late about the exis­tence of atoms to this.

  • Ba Smi says:

    Between 750 BC and 400 BC, the Ancient Greeks com­posed songs meant to be accom­pa­nied by the lyre, reed-pipes, and var­i­ous per­cus­sion instru­ments. Yet we hear a ‘canon’

  • Lilly says:

    Ancient greek accent and pro­noun­ci­a­tion are pure the­o­ry, and a best, a wild guess. Its a dead lan­guage — there is no one alive who knows what it sounds like, and has­nt been for thou­sands of years. Sec­ond­ly, the math­e­mat­ics in how the music is made is cor­rect in terms of notes etc, but there is zero indi­ca­tion on how this may have actu­al­ly sound­ed. We also dont know how the instru­ments were tuned. Clear­ly these researchers are try­ing to scam some more fund­ing from those who dont know any bet­ter. what a joke of an arti­cle.

  • Sonia B. Kaminsky says:

    Peace­ful … :-)

  • Toffer99 says:

    Needs more cow­bell.

  • Tom says:

    Very inter­est­ing bit of infor­ma­tion. I am always stunned, how­ev­er, at how the sim­plest things will prop­a­gate such care­less­ly neg­a­tive com­ments. Of course, the 100% Accu­rate claim is a stretch, but does­n’t jus­ti­fy the bile. Oh, and Lara, the researcher is Eng­lish, so I’d expect he’d have what we Amer­i­cans would call an “accent.”

  • Mara Tzanaki says:

    Here is a nice record­ing from Lyre ‘n Rhap­sody female band, on this songnnnhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vkcolt-nmU

  • William says:

    That’s fas­ci­nat­ing; much nicer than Dudman.nnnCheersnWilliam

  • Justin Thomas Squires says:

    Not enough blast beats.

  • Greco says:

    Ancient Greek is still a liv­ing lan­guage in some places. Google Romey­ka or Romei­ka and you’ll be amazed…

    • Marianne Poulos says:

      Real­ly? Are talk­ing about maybe a rare dialect still spo­ken, like Alvan­i­ti­ka or some­thing?

      • Antonios Alex. says:

        My dear Mar­i­anne, why do you have to com­ment when you don’t have the slight­est idea of what you are talk­ing about? The dialect is called Arvan­i­ti­ka and it is an Alban­ian dialect that was wide­ly spo­ken in main­land Greece until recent­ly. This is a wide­ly acknowl­edged fact.

    • zsvdkhnorc says:

      It is no more Ancient Greek than Mod­ern Greek is. It is unique in that it pre­served the infini­tive in a way that no oth­er mod­ern Hel­lenic lan­guage has.

  • Greco says:

    In some places in Turkey the ancient Greek lan­guage is still alive as Romey­ka or Romeika.nnhttp://youtu.be/UcAYP4irSyQ

  • Fabio Paolo Barbieri says:

    Now set it to music. Jok­ing apart, I can’t believe that the tur­bu­lent Greek nation, that cre­at­ed the the­atre and gave us the very idea of dra­ma, would play music so po-faced­ly.

  • Patrick James Bayham says:

    sounds like a ancient cheese shop…

  • tiosolteiro says:

    Where’s the drop?

  • MGoldstein says:

    This is fas­ci­nat­ing. Now that they’ve estab­lished the tim­bres and pitch­es, do they have any infor­ma­tion on the dura­tion of notes and sys­tem of stress­es (meter and/or rhythm)? They seem to be assum­ing that the songs used the stress­es and paus­es of spo­ken lan­guage.

  • Ben says:

    I did­n’t know that the greeks had an eng­lish accent in those times.

  • Dr Mike Parker says:

    They are com­plete­ly ignor­ing the effect and affect of string­ing mate­r­i­al, gauge, twist and pitch… this is about as fraud­u­lent as it gets.…

  • HumanBeeing says:

    I don’t know. I think they might have mis­in­ter­pret­ed what they found. They could­n’t have had that bad of taste in music back then. Like lan­guages (root words, sim­i­lar­ly spelled and sound­ing words, etc.), they should be able to more or less fig­ure out more close­ly what they real­ly had music-wise by look­ing at known his­tor­i­cal music on the same and sim­i­lar instru­ments, and oth­er instru­ments, and find­ing sim­i­lar com­mon threads that can be inter­pret­ed to come close to what was what.

  • grant says:

    Pret­ty poor qual­i­ty com­ment­ing. I think that one needs to over­look the interpretation,I don’t know any­one who shreds on func­tion­al­ly extinct instru­ments. Also, its not the same tun­ing sys­tem as we use com­mon­ly in north amer­i­ca. We use a descen­dant of Pythagore­an tun­ing but we attempt­ed to make the space between notes all the same size. Not so in many oth­er liv­ing and dead musi­cal tra­di­tions. On the oth­er hand it turned this arti­cle into a fas­ci­nat­ing look at eth­no­cen­trism.

  • jimbo says:

    dun­no how nec­es­sary it was for a clas­si­cist to sing this. he does­nt have a great voice or even make any effort to inte­grate any under­stand­ing of pho­net­ics into his pro­nun­ci­a­tion. all this bick­er­ing in the com­ment sec­tion is only fur­ther evi­dence that the Ancient Greeks are no sub­ject for those with super­fi­cial or pop­u­lar taste

  • jimbo = moron says:

    Actu­al­ly, no it isn’t.

  • jimbo = moron says:

    Wow, every­one here’s so DUMB. :(

  • Charles Hedges says:

    Ste­fan Hagel of Vien­na pub­lished a book on this top­ic with Cam­bridge in 2009, with recon­struc­tions, of how the music MAY have sound­ed. rein­vent­ing the wheel is easy.

  • The_Batmaaaaan says:

    *waits for incep­tion “BRAAAHHHHM**

  • Jack Gabel says:

    full record­ing based on sol­id research here — http://www.northpacificmusic.com/Greeks.html

  • armand says:

    thank you

  • bubble butt says:

    www­wooooowwww very help­ful

  • Andreas G says:

    Sounds like Har­ry Partch to me.

  • Vicky says:

    100% accuracy?.….This “promis­ing” head­line is fun­ny… and the result of such an attempt obvi­ous­ly rather poor.

  • Yoda says:

    As a Greek and regard­ing the pro­nun­ci­a­tion issue:

    Do you know how Hin­du peo­ple speak Eng­lish with a pecu­liar accent, like Peter Sell­ers in “The Par­ty”? The same effect is evi­dent in every lan­guage spo­ken by for­eign­ers. An Ital­ian speak­ing Eng­lish has an accent, and a Greek speak­ing Ara­bic has an accent. If you are native to a lan­guage, you rec­og­nize this pret­ty eas­i­ly.
    So, in this case, unfor­tu­nate­ly the singer has a dis­tinct “Eng­lish” accent. Not to say that the clip isn’t amaz­ing, but it’s not “100% accu­rate”.

    How do we know how Ancient Greek was pro­nounced, you ask. Well for one, it’s quite sure that it was­n’t pro­nounced (to Greek speak­ers) like mod­ern Eng­lish ;) But, more impor­tant­ly, Ancient Greek isn’t exact­ly dead, it exists today in many words that are still in use today in mod­ern Greek. Also, the alpha­bet is the same, as well as basic accen­tu­a­tion sym­bols (though many were scrapped in the 80’s to sim­pli­fy the lan­guage). So there is a con­ti­nu­ity.
    I say we might have a guess as to what Ancient Greek sounds like. Sure­ly this could have been made bet­ter.

  • Louis M (@LouisAMDG) says:

    Inter­est­ing. I imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nized some por­tions of the “Quo Vadis” sound­track (1951) com­posed by Dr. Mik­los Rosza! The scene where Nero sings for the crowd has some bor­rowed (melod­ic) lines from THAT song: lis­ten to it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBIswXv28GI I am con­vinced many will agree. Now, I had read that Mr. Rosza used mate­r­i­al from ancient music along with gre­go­ri­an influ­ences to cre­ate his sound­tracks for epic movies such as Ben Hur, Quo Vadis and El Cid (where he uses entire por­tions of the medieval “Lli­bre Ver­mell de Montser­rat” for his main theme. As a younger man, I had my doubts about the verac­i­ty of those claims since 1950s’ Hol­ly­wood’s stan­dards of authen­tic­i­ty were…“lame”? ;) How­ev­er, hear­ing this re-cre­ation of ancient greek music brought back those mem­o­ries, and I must pay trib­ute to Mik­los Rosza for his use of gen­uine ancient music as an inspi­ra­tion for his bril­liant work. I thought it was worth men­tion­ing ;)

  • Antonios Alex. says:

    You are ABSOLUTELY false. Romey­ka is a Greek dialect almost iden­ti­cal to Pon­tian Greek. Pon­tian Greek just like Cre­tan Greek kept some Archa­ic ele­ments in their gram­mar and vocab­u­lary due to their iso­la­tion from the cen­ter. This is entire­ly dif­fer­ent from say­ing that their lan­guage is ancient Greek, that claim is ridicu­lous. Read some basic lin­guis­tics and stop spam­ming with your non-sense.

  • anonymous says:

    nope

  • This is so gay says:

    …GAY…

  • barthomew says:

    resem­blances in spelling and con­struc­tion

    cithara Latin for harp, the stringed instru­ment asso­ci­at­ed with King David, the psalms, and angels.

    zither as if one takes a harp and puts it on one’s arm and strokes it with one hand

    gui­tar as if one takes the zither, adds a cord and with a pick or fin­gers strums its two parts with each hand

    sitar like a harp or gui­tar laid out flat for stroking

    harp­si­chord like a harp or sitar sus­pend­ed flat on a plat­form with ham­mers as keys for stroking par­tic­u­lar strings

    piano like a harp or sitar sus­pend­ed flat on a plat­form with ham­mers as keys for stroking par­tic­u­lar strings

    organ like a harp­si­chord or piano sus­pend­ed flat on a plat­form with ham­mers as keys for acti­vat­ing par­tic­u­lar pipes that func­tion as strings did

  • Christopher Newman says:

    Oh the nos­tal­gia! Com­ing down through the ages. The years. Of a peo­ple now gone, whose bones have turned to dust. Of a cul­ture long since gone. Fas­ci­nat­ing…

  • Adam Clark says:

    Man, this music sucks.

  • Laura says:

    Total­ly!!

  • Laura says:

    Whoops–My “Total­ly!!” was in response to Alan’s com­ment on
    Octo­ber 30, 2013 “Sounds like the sound­track to Cora­line.”

  • Toad says:

    In order to decide how seri­ous­ly to take this, it would be nec­es­sary to become expert in the field(s) one­self. Short of that, there’s no way to respond to this, except stu­pid­ly.

  • Kemetan God says:

    I can already see it: “Greeks steal Nubian instru­ment. Greek cul­ture is a lie!”

  • Pavlos says:

    on the sub­ject of pro­nun­ci­a­tion, there was an Ancient Greek text found that had described (writ­ten down) what sounds ani­mals make. The exam­ple that put to rest any notion that Ancient Greek sound­ed any­thing sim­i­lar to mod­ern Greek is the sound a sheep makes. The ancient spelling of the sound was “βή,” which today’s Greek would pro­nounce “vee.” Unless sheep changed the way they “baaaa” in the past 2000 years, we know that the Greeks of Ancient Greece spoke noth­ing like what they speak today.

  • WinonasHairyBeaver says:

    imag­ine if you played the greeks some fuckin’ SLAYER

  • Chris says:

    What exact­ly is a ‘for­eign accent’? Haha… yikes

  • daniella says:

    total­ly or even the bea­t­les nor­we­gian wood and oth­ers around that time

  • Luca says:

    Imag­in­ing Alcaeus or love­ly Sap­pho singing along with that is enough to break my heart. How hor­rid.

  • h says:

    Well, con­sid­er­ing no one has one, or even knows what an ancient greek accent sound­ed like. I think for­eign is the best any­one can do.

  • Rybar says:

    Every­one seems to be so focused on the vocals of this song. How­ev­er, the arti­cle is about the time sig­na­tures and the instru­ments them­selves. Stop try­ing to be a know it all and actu­al­ly READ the damn arti­cle. That applies to just about every com­ment.

  • J says:

    Very inter­est­ing. I have no prob­lem with the Eng­lish accent or the uni­ver­si­ty schol­ar singing voice (I’m a pro­fes­sion­al musi­cian and voice train­er). I’m won­der­ing why there are two dif­fer­ent tun­ing sys­tems going on in this record­ing — the obvi­ous­ly well-researched instru­men­tal tun­ing and the mod­ern day vocal tun­ing. Why did­n’t the singer use the same tun­ing as the instru­ment? Sure­ly they can’t both be 100% accu­rate?

  • Mike says:

    agreed, that would have been nice. The instru­ment he’s play­ing has a few strings that are a bit out of tune also. Was that impos­si­ble to avoid? Were the instru­ments so slop­pi­ly made that they could not be tuned prop­er­ly?

  • Dan Gellert says:

    No jok­ing about it! Even if the scales and rhythms were “100% accu­rate” (which I very much doubt), there isn’t a speck of ener­gy or pas­sion in the per­for­mance. It sim­ply does­n’t qual­i­fy as music, and it is dou­bly laugh­able to sug­gest that the ancient Greeks (of all peo­ple!) ever expressed them­selves with that kind of vacu­ity.

  • Bill says:

    How did you deal with the tun­ing vari­abil­i­ties with­in the tetra­chords? It was my under­stand­ing that the mode deter­mined place­ment of the 2nd and 3rd tone in the Ancient Greek music sys­tem was the rea­son we could nev­er know the exact sound/tuning.

  • Tom says:

    You need to men­tion that it’s all in nat­ur­al tune A=432Hz ! Music nowa­days is most­ly A=440Hz which is unnat­ur­al and prob­a­bly nox­ious, but what we hear here is 432Hz (accord­ing to my tuner app).

  • James says:

    No, we don’t, but there are some clues. For exam­ple, ono­matopoeia (appro­pri­ate­ly for Greek!). Aristo­phanes had sheep say­ing “βῆ”, but beta in mod­ern Greek has a “v” sound.

  • Olga says:

    The ancient Greek lan­guage is not a dead lan­guage, has evolved in the new Greek.

  • xtraa says:

    Nice try but this one here is already from 850 BC.: http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/sh/index.htm

  • Thera says:

    I am cur­rent­ly writ­ing a fic­tion set in Ancient Greece and men­tion the music played dur­ing those times. Thank you for shar­ing this beau­ti­ful music, it gave me a huge Sun­day smile!

  • Andrei says:

    Dis­tin­guish­able Amer­i­can Eng­lish accent in the pro­nun­ci­a­tion of the lyrics. Imag­ine lis­ten­ing to some­one read­ing Beowulf with an Ital­ian accent, claim­ing it’s the real way peo­ple spoke in those days, and mod­ern Eng­lish speak­ers can’t have a word about it.

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