NOTATION-BASED ANCIENT GREEK MUSIC SYNTHESIS WITH Dionysios Politis Konstantinos Vandikas Dimitrios Margounakis Computer Science Department Aristotle University of Thessaloniki GREECE http://www.csd.auth.gr/~dpolitis Computer Science Department University of Crete GREECE Computer Science Department Aristotle University of Thessaloniki GREECE ABSTRACT This paper describes an instrument that can compose a song using predicates of Ancient Greek Music. It employs the methodology and musical notation of this specific music system and at the same time, it provides a mapping mechanism that depicts the whole process to composition predicates of the usual notation of Western Music. The aim of this application is to facilitate the efforts of Ancient Greek Music researchers in getting closer to what Ancient Greek Music really was by parametrically performing melodic pieces. ARION provides ethnomusicology with an experimental tool for notation-based Ancient Greek Music synthesis. The project approaches Ancient Greek Music by introducing a virtual Ancient Greek singer, who is able to sing in the Ancient Greek accent, while a musical instrument accompanies him. An easy-to-use and functional interface is provided for adding music and lyrics in a composition, using modern or Ancient Greek symbols of writing and music. Key-Words: - Ancient Greek Music, Music Composers, .NET Framework, Csound, Singing Synthesis. 1. INTRODUCTION “Ancient Greek culture was permeated with music. Probably no other people in history have made more frequent reference to music and musical activity in its literature and art. Yet the subject is practically ignored by nearly all who study that culture or teach about it. Sometimes its very existence seems to be barely acknowledged.”[15] It is true that we know very little about Ancient Greek Music (from this point and forth: AGM) primarily because we have no actual recordings or hearings and secondly because sources about Eastern Music, the successor of AGM, are scattered and not thoroughly indexed as is the case with its counterpart, Western Music. Furthermore, it is difficult for researchers with a profound musical education in Western Music and culture, well advanced in diatonicism and tempered scales to understand the chromatic [11][12] and enharmonic background of AGM [15]. On the other hand, researchers and pioneers like West [15] and Pöhlmann [13] have managed to collect and organize a very large amount of documents and actual music scores and have given a scientific insight for a music system over 2000 years old. This project takes their work and tries to make a connection between that music and prevailing modern Western Music. A software instrument is produced, ARION, capable of reproducing whole songs both musically and vocally and the same time the user can experiment with the various scales, symbols and frequencies having the total freedom to “imagine” and hear how AGM music really was. The graphical user interface of ARION can be seen in Figure 1. Figure 1. The Graphical User Interface of ARION. 2. MUSIC IN ANCIENT GREECE 2.1. An overview A first elementary clue, which is extracted from the research on AGM, is that the singer possessed the main role on a musical performance. A musical instrument accompanied the sung Greek poetry. Ancient Greek poetry and tragedy was inseparable from music [2]. The term “lyric”stems from the word “lyre” . In ancient Greece, the roles of composers and performers intertwined with each other. The reason why