Stories from the Grid – The epigonion: sounds from the Ancient world

The video takes us to Cambridge, where Domenico Vicinanza, a product manager at DANTE who is also a professional music composer, describes how he used a technique called physical modelling to recreate the sound of the epigonion’s 48 strings.

Each string was modelled separately, taking into account information from ancient sources on what the instrument looked like, the materials it was made of, how the strings were constructed and the way it was played. The result is a set of 48 digital files containing the epigonion’s sounds that can be downloaded and played by any musician using a simple keyboard.

“Creating sound libraries and making them available to everybody is much more attractive than building just one beautiful epigonion to be put in a museum and played by only a few lucky people,” says Domenico.

The epigonion is part of the Lost Sounds Orchestra, which features long-lost reconstructed instruments alongside modern violins, cellos and flutes. “We are recording a series of pieces for a CD with real musicians and an epigonion, which is a way to show people that we can use the epigonion as a modern instrument,” Domenico adds.

Domenico used computing resources provided by EGI to bring the epigonion back to life. Thanks to grid computing, it took him just a few hours to create the 48 digital files. In a single core computer Domenico would have to wait a month.

“Domenico’s work is definitely different from a lot of the work we support,” explains Steven Newhouse, EGI’s director. “From high energy physics, and biomedical research to computational chemistry and the humanities, the breadth of science being done on EGI is immense. The flexibility of our infrastructure means that we can support many different research communities, I hope we see many more Domenicos using EGI.”

EGI is a pan-European project providing access to computing resources for researchers through a distributed computing infrastructure called a grid. Distributed grid computing has become an increasingly important and successful framework for collaborative research. This has been made possible thanks to the reliability of the high-bandwidth pan-European GÉANT network and its NREN (National Research and Education Networks) partners. GÉANT and the national networks connect up the grid resources to make them accessible to users (researchers and scientists to students), presenting a seamless network interface for moving data into and around the Grid for processing.

The diverse range of science supported by EGI is being showcased in the Stories from the grid series. Each episode focuses on a particular piece of research that would have been near impossible without EGI. The first episode was launched in February 2012 and describes how the toxic venom used by the marine cone snail can be modified with the aid of grid computer models to produce new anaesthetics and alleviate the muscle spasms caused by the condition dystonia.

The new episode of Stories from the grid, “Reviving the lost sounds of the epigonion”, can be seen at http://go.egi.eu/epigonion.
About the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI)
The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) (www.egi.eu) is a federation of resource providers set up to deliver sustainable, integrated and secure computing services to European researchers and their international partners. EGI.eu is an organisation established in February 2010 to coordinate and manage the infrastructure (EGI) on behalf of its participants: National Grid Initiatives (NGIs) and European Intergovernmental Research Organisations (EIROs). EGI-InSPIRE (EGI-Integrated Sustainable Pan-European Infrastructure for Research in Europe) is a four-year project involving 50 partners in over 40 countries. The project is co-funded by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme (contract number: RI-261323) to help lay down the EGI operational and support processes, as well as to build a sustainable e-Infrastructure, independent from project cycles. By the time EGI-InSPIRE finishes in 2014, EGI will be a sustainable and dependable provider of computing resources for European scientists and researchers. www.egi.eu

About GÉANT
GÉANT is the high speed European communication network dedicated to research and education. In combination with its NREN partners, GÉANT creates a secure, high-speed research infrastructure that serves 40 million researchers in over 8,000 institutions across 40 European countries. Building on the success of its predecessors, GÉANT has been created around the needs of users, providing flexible, end-to-end services that transform the way that researchers collaborate. GÉANT is at the heart of global research networking through wide ranging connections with other world regions, underpinning vital projects that bridge the digital divide and benefit society as a whole.
Co-funded by the European Commission under the EU’s 7th Research and Development Framework Programme, GÉANT is the e-Infrastructure at the heart of the EU’s European Research Area and contributes to the development of emerging Internet technologies. The project partners are 32 European National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), TERENA and DANTE. GÉANT is operated by DANTE on behalf of Europe’s NRENs. www.geant.net

This video was produced by Een van de jongens, a collective of producers and directors based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. In its one year existence the company has produced two children's programmes for Dutch national television and several commissioned short films. Currently Een van de jongens is focussing on short (twenty minute) documentaries.

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Email: catherine.gater@egi.eu