Human touch? Acoustical analysis of ancient music reconstructs tuning and intonation, elucidating aspects of human behavior.

Abstract

Did you ever travel to Greece and wonder what ancient Greek or Roman music sounded like? A mathematical analysis of all compositions that have survived from antiquity now allows us to reconstruct the exact tuning and intonation. According to this analysis, ancient musicians preferred pure intonation. However, they had a keen sense of its combinatorial limitations on instruments with strings of fixed length, such as lyres, and they recognized the necessity of slight deviations from pure intonation during vocal performance to allow for more tonal complexity. This spirit is paralleled in ancient atomic philosophy, which posited that atoms sometimes swerved to allow for more combinatorial complexity and unexpected effects.