Abstract:

Recently there has been increasing interest of scientists for
the performance of singing or reciting voices of the past in
utilising analysis-synthesis methods. In the domain of
Ancient Greek musicology indeed, where we find the
roots of the occidental music, the main research has been
done mostly by scholars of classical Greek literature.
However there is still is a vast territory for research in
audio performances to be carried out with the help of new
digital technologies.
In this paper, we will present an attempt to decode a
recited text of Ancient Greek tragedy and render it into
sound. At the first paragraph of this article we underline
the origin of music arising from the melodicity of speech
in Ancient Greek tragedy. In the second paragraph, we
describe the methodology we have used in order to
analyse the voice of S. Psaroudak&s, himself professor of
Ancient Greek music, by an open source prosodic feature
extraction tool based on Praat. We give a description of
the prosodic analysis, implementation details and discuss
its feature extension capabilities as well. Last, we refer to
the difference between the Ancient and Modern Greek
phonological system, the application of this research in
music and further development.