£3.5m project to record ancient music

Music from the ancient world – from the Stone Age to the Romans – will be recreated and recorded as part of a £3.5 million European Music Archaeology Project.

A team of researchers throughout Europe who have devised the project, hoping to seek a common European musical heritage rooted in antiquity. Using a wide range of evidence – including archaeological survivals and ancient pictures – the European Music Archaeology Project researchers will attempt to reconstruct primitive musical instruments from as long ago as 40,000 BC and as “recently” as 400 AD. Specialist performers will then experiment with the recreated instruments and reach conclusions about the type of music that was played on them.

Dr Rupert Till of the University of Huddersfield will oversee the creation of a special record label, which will feature the project’s findings. “The project is not really designed to recreate ancient music as such,” he explains. “You can’t really know what music sounded like thousands of years ago. But you can produce music that demonstrates the instruments and some of the techniques used.”

- See more at: http://historyoftheancientworld.com/2013/06/3-5m-project-to-record-ancient-music/#sthash.wxR0sam6.dpuf