Brève n° 255
Scientists Reconstruct An Ancient Greek Musical Instrument, The
Epigonion
Article lu dans ScienceDaily,
le 9 mars 2009. The ASTRA project, standing for Ancient instruments Sound/Timbre
Reconstruction Application, has revived an instrument that hasn’t been played
or heard in centuries.
Using
the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE infrastructure for computing power, a team
based in Salerno and Catania, Italy, has reconstructed the “epigonion,” a
harp-like, stringed instrument used in ancient Greece. With data from numerous
sources, including pictures on urns, fragments from excavations and written
descriptions, the team has been able to model what the instrument would have
looked and sounded like.
Their
model has become sophisticated enough to be used by musicians of the
Conservatories of Music of Salerno and Parma in concerts.
The
idea and mathematical concepts behind this work is several decades old, the
first attempts being made in 1971. Now with grid technology these researchers
have the required computing power to recreate an ancient instrument that would
previously have been too expensive and too difficult to manufacture by hand.
Using grid computing also means that the data used and discovered during the
research is easily available to other researchers, such as archaeologists and
historians.
“The
combination of the EGEE grid computing infrastructures and the high speed
GÉANT2 and EUMEDCONNECT networks provided not only the immense computing power
needed by ASTRA, it also allowed researchers, historians, physicists,
engineers, archaeologists to bring their knowledge and their experiences
together,” added Domenico Vicinanza, Technical co-ordinator of ASTRA project
and DANTE Network Engineer. “The benefits of the collaborative approach used in
this project are far reaching. ASTRA and EGEE not only make it possible to
recreate instruments not existing anymore, they also allow any model and its
associated data to be accessed by the whole scientific and education community
worldwide.”
The
ASTRA project will be demonstrating the epigonion at this week’s EGEE User
Forum, 2-6 March 2009, Catania, Italy.
People will be able to listen to the reconstructed instrument and play
it using a MIDI keyboard. The demonstration will also allow visitors to run
real reconstruction on the grid. A professional musician will play ancient
scores on the epigonion.
DATE DE PUBLICATION EN LIGNE : 22 AVRIL 2009