TOWARDS A PROSODY MODEL OF ATTIC TRAGIC POETRY: FROM LOGOS TO MOUSIKÉ

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 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. 1