dDAGM App

The dDAGM App has been developed by Tosca A.C. Lynch and collects all the musical notes attested in the standard edition of the Greek musical documents (DAGM = Pöhlmann, E. and West, M., (2001) Documents of Ancient Greek Music, OUP).

This app is designed to help you visualise and explore the distribution of different notes recorded in the in Classical and Imperial musical documents as well as hear them by pressing the dedicated keys on your keyboard.

You can access the app via the following link: https://lynchtac.shinyapps.io/dDAGM/

The special characters appear correctly in Google Chrome and Safari

The first chart represents the distribution of ancient Greek musical notes that are attested in Classical and Hellenistic documents, divided by keys. You can select the key families you are interested in by ticking the relevant boxes in the side panel on the left, and the list of the relative documents will appear below the chart.

The second chart represents the distribution of Vocal and Instrumental notes that are attested in Imperial documents, and is also followed by a list of the relative documents. You can select the note types you are interested in by ticking the relevant boxes in the side panel on the left.

These charts are interactive. You can zoom in on areas you wish to explore in greater detail as well as hover over the bars to compare the number of occurrences of each note in in different groups and the relative percentages.

You can also hear the frequency of different notes by pressing the relative keys on your keyboard — for example, the Greek note M corresponds to the m key (other keys are indicated in the chart).

The note and its frequency, as well as its modern equivalent based on the Koilē standard (A4~432Hz), will be displayed in the sidebar whenever you press a key.
The fine tuning of the lower movable notes is set in accordance with Archytas' common interval at the bottom of all pykna (~63 cents). This makes it possible to provide a uniform overview of the system, but the fine tuning would have varied in practice (cf. Lynch 2022a–b).

If any sound keeps playing after you release the key, you can stop all sounds by pressing the Escape key or clicking the Stop All Tones button in the sidebar. Enjoy!

References

Lynch, T.A.C. 2022a ‘Unlocking the Riddles of Classical Greek Melodies I: Dorian Keys to the Harmonic Revolution of the New Music and the Hellenistic Musical Documents’, GRMS 10.2, 383-415.

Lynch, T.A.C. 2022b.

‘Unlocking the Riddles of Classical Greek Melodies II: The Revolution of the New Music in the Ashmolean Papyri (DAGM 5–6) and Athenaeus’ Paean (DAGM 20)’, GRMS 10.2, 416–467.

Lynch, T.A.C. 2024a ‘Unlocking the Riddles of Imperial Greek Melodies: the ‘Lydian’ Metamorphosis of the Classical Harmonic System’, GRMS 12.1, 70-100.

Pöhlmann, E. and West, M., (2001) Documents of Ancient Greek Music, OUP.