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Software Enables Re-Creation of 'Lost' Instrument
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that the Lituus, a 2.4m (8ft) -long trumpet-like instrument, was played in Ancient Rome but fell out of use some 300 years ago. Bach even composed a motet (a choral musical composition) for the Lituus, one of the last pieces of music written for the instrument.. But until now, no one had a clear idea of what this instrument looked or sounded like until researchers at Edinburgh University developed software that enabled them to design the Lituus even though no one alive today has heard, played or even seen a picture of this forgotten instrument." (Continues below.)
The team started with cross-section diagrams of instruments they believed to be similar to the Lituus and the range of notes it played. 'The software used this data to design an elegant, usable instrument with the required acoustic and tonal qualities. The key was to ensure that the design we generated would not only sound right but look right as well,' says Professor Murray Campbell. 'Crucially, the final design produced by the software could have been made by a manufacturer in Bach's time without too much difficulty.' Performed by the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (SCB) the Lituus produced a piercing trumpet-like sound interleaving with the vocals in an experimental performance of Bach's 'O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht' in Switzerland earlier this year, giving the music a haunting feel that can't be reproduced by modern instruments. The software opens up the possibility that brass instruments could be customized more closely to the needs of individual players in the future — catering more closely to the differing needs of jazz, classical and other players all over the world. 'Sophisticated computer modelling software has a huge role to play in the way we make music in the future.'"
It reminds me of Matrix quote: Because you have to wonder: how do the machines know what Tasty Wheat tasted like? Maybe they got it wrong...
Ricoooooooolllllaaaaaaaaa
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
Looks a bit like those Slovak Fujara pipes, but the sound is not so convincing, Fujara sound is amazing!
Scientists will try to reconstruct a long-lost instrument called a turntable based on the lyrics from an ancient artist named Lady Gaga. But since RIAA at the time is basically runs the all governments it will brand these scientists enemies of the state and will summarily execute them. That year is 2409. The same year Linux is finally ready for the desktop.
To hear the sounds generated by this re-created instrument, reinforced me in my belief that extinct instruments are extinct with very good reasons. It's like when I hear that they will publish some "previously unreleased" songs from The Beatles, or whoever. I mean, if they didn't release them then, it was probably because they weren't good enough.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
they keep saying re-creation, and it sounds unique and what not -- sounds like a million squeaky horns i've heard before.
We'll know when the inevitable "Oh, we've had one of those in our family for generations, didn't realize they were supposedly extinct. Sounds kind of like it but not quite" comes forward.
So they completely modeled after images and assumptions?
I would understand that no instrument remains playable after >300 years.
But I'm a bit surprised that there aren't any left at all. 300 years
isn't that long, even on the "human history" scale.
What happened?
>even though no one alive today has heard, played or even seen a picture of this forgotten instrument."
So in fact he could make it sound like any old shit, and who is to disagree with him? :)
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
I really don't want to say anything, But I would swear i remember seeing one of those hanging on the wall of my great-uncle's barn 35 or so years ago; the barn is in Extreme Rural Tennessee, so you could imagine my surprise.
I'll see if I can get my mm to investigate.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
And the best thing about it--nobody can prove it wrong.
I was thinking something along these lines too - H2G2 Has something about making predictions of the future - one nice tip - Predict something that can never be proven wrong (or at least is very unlikely to be proven wrong).
Isn't this what these guys have done, but instead taken a bit of the past, and proven it, without it being unprovable? Also if one of these horns was now found in original condition, they could simply go "well thats not the right horn, this : (insert newly created horn) is the one we remade, that must be some other type of horn!".
And its likely some students passed their courses via this too. I mean, they have created some impressive technology, the ability to create usable, realistic instruments... but dont claim its solving some unsolvable problem. To solve that problem it must come up with ONE and ONLY ONE solution, and im sure you could do lots of with the horn and still get something which sounds close enough to be concidered the "correct" one.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Actually, brute-forcing a game of chess IS trivial. Computationally intensive, but it is not a complicated algorithm.
The computer considers a move (Say, Knight pawn e5)
The computer computes all possible states of the board X moves after the move it is considering (upperbound 16^x, should usually be around 10^x or less).
Assign each of these possible states a desirability value. This can be computed based on any set of strategic criteria. The simplest is material value, more complicated ones will consider control of the center, pins, forks, open files, etc.
Average the values together.
Repeat for each of the computer's possible moves.
Choose the move with the highest value.
Most immediate way to improve this is to add a dynamic weighting to the average as the computer moves down the tree of possible moves. Some moves an opponent is just not likely to make, so outcomes proceeding from those moves should be weighted less (this is just an expansion of the rule-awareness of the computer, for example the computer should be assigning zero weight to any moves that cause the opponent to put their own king in check, capture their own pieces, etc.--basically this is adding soft-rules, not likely in addition to impossible).
Computer chess AI was only noteworthy back in the day because of the power needed to do it, not because programming the AI is an inherently difficult task. Building the computers that could do all the calculations in a timely fashion was the real problem of a chess computer. Sure, Babbage's machine could have done it, but you would have died of old age waiting for the computer to respond to your spanish opening.
We still have these instruments in some parts of Romania, they are called "bucium" or "tulnic" (varies across the regions of the country).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucium
http://i41.tinypic.com/6jgkk8.jpg
root@127.0.0.1
The allegedly "Roman" Lituus looks remarkably like the Swedish NÃverlur http://files.reseguiden.se/files/0/rg_738300_m600.jpg. I remember David Munrow demonstrating something like it in his Early Music TV programme back in the mid-70s. It sounds very difficult to keep in pitch and I'd suggest that a Renaissance Cornett (perhaps even a Lysard, but not a Serpent) would be a more appropriate instrument for the performance.
Conjectural instruments like the Lituus aren't really worth the effort.
Not sure why this study and article claims the instrument was "lost", and that no one knows what it looks like â" there are -countless- details and elaborate accounts on the various Lituus in musical history. Furthermore, the "long horn" type of instrument shown as being the recreation of the "lost Lituus nobody has ever seen" is not a Lituus at all â" it's nothing short a very common design of long horn from the european medievals.
> Actually, brute-forcing a game of chess IS trivial. Computationally intensive, but it is not a complicated algorithm.
It's not trivial because the sun will burn out before you get the answer to the very first move of the game. I agree that if your solution doesn't have to work then the solution is indeed trivial, but if the solution doesn't have to work then an even simpler one is to just resign the game immediately, move a random piece, etc, for all the difference it will make.
> I'll see if I can get my mm to investigate.
It's supposed to be quite a large instrument - you might be better off asking your cm or maybe even your m to help out.
And "close enough" is important here, because there never was a One True Lituus. Modern acoustic musical instruments exhibit a great deal of variety in dimensions, materials, shape, and even UI (for example, number of keys or valves), and still go by the same name. It's always been that way.
So they know the instrument's range and typical length. They know what materials were available in the past. It's an interesting exercise to have a computer reproduce it, but hardly necessary, given the skill of the makers. What they have here can almost certainly be called a Lituus.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
I hate to tell you this, but that was just a horse dildo. Funny, the things age does to memory: one minute you're looking at a horse dildo, the next minute, you're convinced that ancient instruments are hanging out in rural Tennessee.
The PhD thesis was the horn profiling software. It's quite a technological advance in music. We went from hand made horns individuals figured out to play, to mass produced horns designed to a specification of brass and wood everybody learned to play exactly the same way. Now we've come full circle, the purpose of the software was to aid manufacturing of an individual instrument to their style of play. and physical ability.. that's actually a huge accomplishment in the history of music. It's the same type of advance made in sports so Tiger Woods can be digitally analyzed and have golf clubs made specifically for the mechanics of his swing based on scientific data.
I think the lituus was sort of a "parlor trick" use of the software. They had a piece of music, so sound patterns it was supposed to play, and they had written accounts of it's length, material, and basic appearance. They were able to plug that in and get a pattern for a real instrument out.
To complete the technology circle, these plans need to be given to real antique instrument re-creators to improve the playability and quality of the horn. Building a horn to a computer spec is way different than a craftsman building one by hand. They could improve their software if they had a craftsman "fix" their design to smooth out the rough patches and properly match the technology of the time, which would introduce "errors" that make the instrument more unique than one made by CNC machine.
Please read the second link in the summary. It's completely bonkers to think that an ancient Roman instrument just happened to survive into Bach's time, and then disappeared without a trace. We have descriptions of instruments and musical practice from Bach's time, and there is no lituus. We also have descriptions of ancient Roman (and Greek and Biblical) instruments from Bach's time, stuff that Bach would have known, and there are Litui in there. Bach took the name of an ancient Roman instrument because for some reason, probably having to do with the original purpose of that particular "cantata" (more likely it was a funeral motet), a fancy Latin name was more appropriate. The instrument itself would have been a horn or, less likely, a trumpet pitched in Bb. The difference between a Baroque horn and Baroque trumpet of that pitch would have been only the exact shape of the bore and the configuration of the mouthpiece.
Sorry, but the only evidence for the existence of the ancient Lituus in Bach's time is the occasional use of a Latin term in place of a German or Italian or some other vernacular term. That adds up to exactly zero evidence.
That said, the modelling software is pretty neat.
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I am a musicologist, but I am not your musicologist, and this message does not constitute musicological advice. (In most juristictions.)
Take the violin. Millions made but why is it that a Stradivarius sounds better than all of them? Back then there was no one big musical instrument maker to make a standard to adhere to. Even today the sound of an old Gibson Les Paul or Fender Strat is something a manufacturer might strive for but not quit achieve.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.