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Today's demanding academic research needs sophisticated computing power.
What if there was a way to put spare computing power at a university to good use
by making it available to others. If we can pool this computing power together
we will be able to speed up research work. That's exactly what the
European Grid Infrastructure does, with the grid.
This network of computer servers at universities across Europe supports a wide range of cutting edge research.
Welcome to Stories from the Grid.
In this episode, the Epigonion.
This greek string instrument hasn't been heard for centuries.
Ancient information of the Epigonion has been combined with the power of the grid
to recreate its sound.
Now it can be played once again, in this orchestra, using just a keyboard and a laptop.
Got a keyboard of your own?
Then you might just as well download the sounds of the Epigonion and play it yourself.
This all started with one man, who believes that harmony in nature and in physics
are not that far apart.
I'm a scientist, researcher and a music composer
The Epigonion is an extremely interesting instrument, it exists
from five to six centuries before Christ. It has forty eight strings.
The Epigonion if you like, is the first instrument in history that allowed
the players to play harmonies together, so to pluck more than
one string at the same time.
Creating sound libraries and making them available for everybody,
we thought it was much more attractive than just having a beautifully crafted
wooden made
sample of the Epigonion to be put in a museum
and just a few lucky people
could touch it.
But how do you digitally recreate the sound of an instrument
that hasn't been around for thousands of years?
There are quite a lot of descriptions about the
history of this instrument. We analysed pictures from
pottery, frescoes, from Greek vases. This is the kind of information we
normally work with.
All this information was then combined in reconstruction software
to calculate what the Epigonion sounded like
this technique is called physical modelling
The reconstruction of
of each string
of the Epigonion and can be considered as a separate problem.
So we have forty eight strings for example
you can have forty-eight different reconstruction jobs that you can run on the grid.
On a standard laptop or on a standard computer
reconstructing all the sounds that we use
to play an Epigonion would take something like a month
worth of computation and calculation. On the grid it just takes two to four hours.
The results that are coming back from the grid
are a .ZIP file, let's say a file containing
forty eight audio files, each of them is the reproduction of the
of the sound of that particular string, in this way any musician can play,
can play the Epigonion just using a,
just using a keyboard
Once calculated the sounds of the Epigonion can be used for a number of interesting musical experiments,
one of them is the Lost Sounds Orchestra,
which features reconstructed instruments like the Epigonion.
We are recording a series of pieces for a CD for example
with real musicians
and an Epigonion
and this is just a way to show, show people that we can
actually use the Epigonion
as a modern instrument, as a guitar, as any other instrument.
So to wrap it all up. To recreate the sound of the Greek Epigonion
information from ancient sources has been collected to find out what the
instrument looked like,
what materials it was made of,
how the strings were constructed and how it was played. This knowledge was combined
with a technique called physical modeling.
Calculation were then needed to find out how all the properties would work together
to create the sound for each of the forty eight strings.
For each string these calculations were sent to the grid.
The results that came back were used to create a sound library,
so musicians anywhere can now freely play the Epigonion.
Now we know how the grid has help to find out what an Epigonion sounds like,
what more could be possible in the future?
I work for DANTE
the organization building and operating GÉANT, the European backbone for research and
education. Thanks to this project, thanks to the role
of advanced networking and grid computing we expect that musicians can eventually be
able to play together
with really low latency and probably having a concert or jam session
sitting in their homes or in their institutions that can be
thousands of kilometres away.
The vast computing power of the grid has turned out to be an excellent tool for
musical science, want to see how the grid is useful in other fields of research?
Then join us next time for another episode of
Stories from the Grid