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Hear the World’s Oldest Known Song, “Hurrian Hymn No. 6” Written 3400 Years Ago
- iancmceachern 4y agoWhat about Hymns number 1-5?
- midislack 4y agoNice to see they're putting out MIDI files.
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- drieddust 4y agoTwo old yet alive Indian languages Sanskrit and Tamil have hymns even older. I wonder why Sanskrit and it's rich collection of hymns completely gets ignored. Nasadiya Suktam[0] from RigVeda[1] ponders the questions of our origins in sweet melody. [0] https://youtu.be/SYlP7DXtyQ8 https://youtu.be/SYlP7DXtyQ8 [1] https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda
- cynicalguy 4y agoCame here to saw this. The problem with the internet as a whole is euro-centrism. Pretty sure even Chinese culture has equally old "hymns" and songs. South American too, but the conquistadors destroyed everything.
- agluszak 4y agoA dog walked into a tavern and said, "I can't see a thing. I'll open this one."
- fipar 4y agoIn line with the topic of old/ancient sounds and music, I found The Soundscape[0] by Murray Schafer[1] (TIL he died last year) very interesting. I enjoy what I think is a wide range of music styles, some of which are best experienced (by me, to any extent) when listened to very loud, yet his concept of "ear cleansing" is one I found compelling. [0]: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1398769M/The_soundscape https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1398769M/The_soundscape [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Murray_Schafer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Murray_Schafer
- dudeguy3301 4y agohow did this article miss heilung's version?!?!
- Jemm 4y agoSong from 1400 BCE just happens to conform to the western scale?
- twohroewi43 4y ago[flagged]
- DSingularity 4y agoThat last line really came out of nowhere. Why did she even include it? Is there people demolishing mosques and raping nuns? What a wild thing to allege at the end of an otherwise reasonable opinion on the evolution of languages.
- cynicalguy 4y ago
- drewcoo 4y agohttps://www.ucanews.com/news/no-one-responsible-for-mosque-demolition-as-hindutva-triumphs/89737 https://www.ucanews.com/news/no-one-responsible-for-mosque-d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Kandhamal_nun_gang_rape_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Kandhamal_nun_gang_rape_c...
- DSingularity 4y agoGoodness. The key accused was granted bail after two years in prison. Such brazen complicity from the entire justice system in India. The police watched. The judges only convicted three people in an act that seems to have in various degrees involved tens of people. And who knows how many of those convicted were released. Disgusting.
- Bayart 4y agoPlenty of things can be older than 3400 years if you go by philological theory. It's completely different from a text that's actually, provably, archeologically at least 3400 years old.
- theflyingelvis 4y agoIf this is hymn no. 6, aren’t there five older hymns?
- cedilla 4y agoIf I understand correctly, there where 36 clay tablets with hymns on them found at a dig, and this just happens to be the sixth one to be catalogued.
- agnosticmantis 4y agoOr even 6 if they were written by computer scientists counting from 0.
- dotancohen 4y ago0 was not invented yet.
- sideshowb 4y agoNumber 5 was a mambo
- bsza 4y agoAs were 1 to 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzMa7LZuyAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzMa7LZuyAc
- dstick 4y agoI know this isn't Reddit, but this comment deserves an award ;-)
- dodslaser 4y agoA little bit of Nikkal...
- samstave 4y agohttps://youtu.be/XanjZw5hPvE?t=130 https://youtu.be/XanjZw5hPvE?t=130
- solarized 4y agoHow come sundanese, javanese, balinese, gamelan doesn't count into oldest song.
- riffraff 4y agoAre there written records of gamelan music from >3400 years ago?
- mrwh 4y ago"In Javanese mythology, the gamelan was created by Sang Hyang Guru in Saka era 167 (c. AD 230)" According to Wikipedia. Presumably there's a history of protogamelans, but still.
- erklik 4y ago> mythology maybe that's why? Do we know if it's actually created in AD 230?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- coldtea 4y ago>In Javanese mythology, the gamelan was created by Sang Hyang Guru in Saka era 167 (c. AD 230) So? (a) that's still 1000s of years later than the one above. (b) that's in the mythology, not an actual historical song found in some inscription or something...
- shp0ngle 4y agoIn Sumer/Akkadia/Babylonia/Mesopotamia (sorry, I always confuse them with each other) we have oldest writings ever and oldest songs ever, simply because they used burned clay to write stuff and that survives the longest. Other cultures either didn’t write stuff down, or they did, but on less resilient material. For example Egypt civilisation is probably older, but they used papyrus, which survives less than clay. edit: I guess I am wrong, see below So this song is not really “oldest song ever”, that is a hyperbole, but oldest surviving writing of a song.
- jjcon 4y agoWe know which strings were plucked but we don’t know how the instrument was tuned or how long the notes were… as cool as this is, I wouldn’t really say this is the oldest *known* song (there are older that we know equally little about).
- colechristensen 4y agoAt which level of detail does this line of thinking stop? At any level of detail there could always be someone saying you didn’t really know a song unless…
- jjcon 4y agoI agree with the other comments here - you should be able to recognize the different renditions as such with an untrained ear. Basically I’d start with knowing the notes of the song… kinda the most important thing but we just just don’t for this I’ll note here too that the article is what draws that line (known vs unknown) not me - I’m just disagreeing with where they have drawn the line since there are older songs that we… “know equally little about”
- praptak 4y agoIf two independent teams recreate this song based on our best knowledge about how the song sounded, can you tell these renditions are two versions of the same song? Not a perfect test (experts can recognize more similarities) but generally makes it possible to discern "we know jack shit" from "we know the melody, just maybe not exactly how the instrument sounded".
- hot_gril 4y agoI listen to a lot of old music where there are many different renditions of the same song, especially Armenian folk music that was either unwritten or transcribed later, and I agree with this metric.
- dwighttk 4y agoThe article mentions two different interpretations of the melody… one of the videos I played had both and they sounded quite different to me.
- verisimi 4y agoYou don't really hear the tune... You hear an interpretation of what it might have been like. If you listen to the piece by Dr Anne Kilmer (at 2:50) and then compare it to the other examples, you will struggle to hear a similarity in the tune - at least I couldn't.
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- hot_gril 4y agoMusic from 1400BC is cool, but the real throwback is the 2009 YouTube video in the article that starts with Weird Al's "eBay" and default animated text.
- manquer 4y agoOldest written song perhaps. Or even oldest written document of a song, there maybe very well be later writings of a older song For the title of oldest known song, Wouldn't the Vedas(Rig Veda in particular) predate this time frame ? They are also hymns and their oral intonations were specifically preserved in transmission .
- _emacsomancer_ 4y agoSamaved is the one that was sung.
- Tuna-Fish 4y agoProbably not. The date the Vedas were created is not settled. The common dating is "1500BCE-1000BCE", but more modern research generally goes for the closer end of that range, making the Hymn to Nikkal older.
- Bayart 4y agoThe Song of Deborah may be older than the Rig Veda, and that's already pretty young compared to the properly ancient stuff from Egypt and Mesopotamia.
- Cryptonic 4y agoStrange that it exacly sounds like you expect it to sound.
- anotheryou 4y agoor interpreted exactly the way you expect it to sound :) you know how far cover songs can go
- boomlinde 4y agoBecause there is no rhythm or pitch information recorded, it sounds the way you'd expect it to sound because that's nearly the only thing these interpretations have to work with.
- artificial 4y agoSeikilos Epitaph has the notation. Not nearly as old. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph
- kgeist 4y agoMy favorite rendition: https://youtu.be/9RjBePQV4xE https://youtu.be/9RjBePQV4xE
- tiborsaas 4y agoHere it is in MIDI format: https://github.com/midi-ld/h.6/tree/master/midi https://github.com/midi-ld/h.6/tree/master/midi
- boomlinde 4y agoThis was reconstructed from fingering instructions with no information on rhythm or pitch. Maybe by looking at the crude drawings available of the instrument to make a better guess what the pitches might be, but this is definitely more of a creative interpretation than a historical record.
- colordrops 4y agoEven if rhythm and pitch were available it would still be a creative interpretation. With full sheet music we don't always know the full intention of the composer or the nuances that would be taught in person.
- slingnow 4y agoIf your argument is just that "everything boils down to a creative interpretation", I don't see how this is a really meaningful or interesting take. The point is that there are widely varying degrees of creative interpretation, and this "transcription" is _nothing_ at all like interpreting a piece of sheet music.
- dwohnitmok 4y agoYes but there's different degrees of creative interpretation. To boomlinde's point, modern "reconstructions" of the hymn differ wildly, to the point that a listener wouldn't be able to tell they were the same song, or even that they were really related.
- boomlinde 4y ago> Even if rhythm and pitch were available it would still be a creative interpretation. The important difference here I think is that with a well-defined and understood notation there is a shared frame of reference for interpretation. I can take take two interpretations of works from BWV where the performers can liberally indulge in artistic license where the notation leaves something up to the performer, and I can reflect on the differences and similarities without ever mistaking them for different compositions. Here, it is not just the interpretation of the notation by the performer that requires creative license, but the interpretation by who ever "transcribed" it to modern notation. The video in the article plays two different such interpretations that for obvious reasons then sound entirely different and are not recognizable as the same piece of music, because they really are not. If you take away the pitch and rhythm information from BWV and add a long forgotten system of tablature for some long forgotten instrument that we've only ever seen represented as crude carvings and ask people to transcribe and play it, you'd get similar results.
- the_omegist 4y agoI appreciate the article included different versions of the song. That serves as a reminder that this song is more or less "reconstructed" from the forever-lost original one and also lets us compare their interpretations. Surprisingly, I love the samuraiguitarist version : there is something unique in the mix of new technology and ancient music but also a melancholy only electric guitar (and violin?) can bring... On a side note and like another comment mentioned : it's surprising that, like when I've read Gilgamesh (oldest known written story), there is a very modern feel to it. Not much really changed in 3400 years except for technology...
- psychoslave 4y agoNothing changed expect what did, and people are still able to project different representations out of the roughly same stimuli. :D
- inciampati 4y agoThere will be at most something like 5000 de novo mutations along any evolutionary line from 3400 BP. Compare that to 3 million differences between any two human genomes. It's clear from this basic fact that very little evolutionary time has passed, and people from then and now would be indistinguishable in virtually all aspects.
- dalbasal 4y agoTo that side note... Perhaps your surprising feeling relates to the fact that storytelling is a very old art, and we have been practising it intensely for a long time. In the greater scheme, maybe 3400 years isn't as long for storytelling as it is for most arts and practices that you'd be comparing to. Rock n Roll from 2022 isn't that different to someone from 2002. Rock and Roll from 1972 is very different to 1952. You could blow a 1952 mind mind with Ziggy Stardust or Houses of the Holy.
- the_omegist 4y agoTrue. But the fact that the way the story was told (the structure of the story) as well as the characters psychology was very "modern". For example, I think I can't like japanese literature (for the few I've read) because of their weird way of telling stories [0]. So I would have expected something older and less "cosmopolitan" to be harder to get into... Well perhaps the translator took some "freedom" by modernizing it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishotenketsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishotenketsu
- samstave 4y agoWhat happened to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5? of "oldest known song"
- ant6n 4y agoProbably unknown
- mellosouls 4y agoWow they had rap back then?
- samstave 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XanjZw5hPvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XanjZw5hPvE
- WonderBuilder 4y agoIt is unreal how I am listening to the oldest song in recorded history as I look at machine-created art crafted by text and images given to Stable Diffusion.
- stormdennis 4y agoSo, firstly he tells us near the start that the music we're listening to the oldest known musical piece and then at the end he tells us that we don't really know what it sounded like?
- cmitsakis 4y agoHere is another performance of the song by Peter Pringle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8tfBLvlN98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8tfBLvlN98
- circa 4y agoI definitely prefer the remix
- anshumankmr 4y agoImagine telling the writers that their music would be played by someone 3000 years later. 1) The playing could be "recorded" 2) heard all across the world by various people for free of cost 3) this "recording" could be shared by "radio" waves
- datavirtue 4y agoI hear Disney just bought the rights to this. It will be another 3400 yrs before you can play it again.
- shireboy 4y agoOne has to think there are at least 5 older songs…
- FeistySkink 4y agoMaybe they were made in Star Wars order.
- marricks 4y agoThe title should be “oldest reconstructed song” besides on through five there’s a song from 4,000 years ago we know of which can’t be reconstructed.
- kibwen 4y agoIn a somewhat similar vein, here's Peter Pringle singing the opening lines of The Epic of Gilgamesh (written 4,000 years ago), using our best guess at Sumerian pronunciation and playing a modern recreation of an instrument that the Sumerians would have had, as an attempt to guess what ancient Sumerian music might have sounded like: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs https://youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y agoWhoa, that was epic to hear. Thanks for posting this! I keep coming across The Epic of Gilgamesh a lot recently. As one of the oldest stories, it comes up a fair bit in discussions of myth and the hero's journey. (Joseph Campbell references it in his Hero with a Thousand Faces.) I also found it again through another lens when reading about Jungian archetypes, where Gilgamesh himself helps demonstrate the masculine archetype of the King. I've been meaning to read the original story, but I'd never thought to punch it into YouTube. 4,000 years isn't that long ago. People back then were basically just like us. It's not hard to imagine them gathering around, excited after a long day (or a long year) of work, chatting with their friends in some little ur-amphitheater that's long since been reduced to dust. Some traveling singer takes the stage, and a hush falls over the crowd as the first notes echo out. In those days, in those distant days...
- eth0up 4y agoIf you appreciated that, you might also appreciate the vast array of world music performed by Arany Zoltan. He's one of my favorites. You'll find both ancient and more modern world tunes, all played with fine skill. Not sure about Sumerian though. https://m.youtube.com/c/AranyZolt%C3%A1n/videos https://m.youtube.com/c/AranyZolt%C3%A1n/videos
- scrivna 4y agoI mean it’s no Ed Sheeran but for 4k years old I guess it’s pretty on point.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoHas this been subject to a copyright claim yet?
- user3939382 4y agoI open the link -- the whole page is covered with a message I could barely get closed "WEVE DETECTED AN ADBLOCKER" meanwhile the key piece of the article is someone else's YouTube video. How many people would be looking at this article if they weren't freeloading off someone else's content and it had no A/V? Give me a break.
- ShamelessC 4y agoSame thing happened to me with next.dns. > Adblock Detected! > It looks like you’re using an ad blocker. With almost half of web users now running ad blockers, it’s now getting very hard to sustain an educational website and keep it free. > If you would like to support Open Culture, please consider exempting our site (www.openculture.com) from your ad blocker, or making a contribution to Open Culture through PayPal, Venmo, Patreon or even Crypto. We thank you in advance!!
- afiori 4y agoI do not know what kind of advertisement they host, but it is perfectly feasible (if less lucrative) to host privacy-preserving user-friendly ads. I adblock everything anyway as the internet is generally terrible, but I am aware that many good intentioned website are caught in the crossfire of this war.
- arbitrage 4y agoI received no such warnings. Perhaps you need a better adblocker?
- user3939382 4y agoWhat I really need is a world without ads. A man can dream.
- frakt0x90 4y agoThe recreations are absurdly western sounding. The middle east has a long history of not using 12-tone equal temperament scales of Europe and while it's somewhat interesting to fantasize what it would sound like in the common current context, it seems a little white-washing and disingenuous. You can get more info here for example: https://youtu.be/Kr3quGh7pJA https://youtu.be/Kr3quGh7pJA
- Tor3 4y agoAgreed. Nobody knows what it would sound like, but I can't imagine it would sound as someone like myself plucking notes off a fretted guitar. You only have to look at contemporary music outside of Western tradition to hear something which doesn't sound anything like that.
- Hayvok 4y ago> The recreations are absurdly Western sounding… white-washing and disingenuous From the article— “University of California emeritus professor of Assyriology Anne Kilmer spent 15 years researching the tablet, before transcribing it into modern musical notation in 1972.” I’m sure Professor Kilmer, who has spent her entire career studying these civilizations and resurrecting some small piece of their history and culture for our modern generations to enjoy and appreciate before they disappear forever, would be thrilled to hear you summarize her decades of work as “white washing”. The music is published and open source - anyone can go and play it! Publish their own interpretation! They already seem to range from authentic recreations of traditional instruments to a modern guitar. Congratulations to Dr. Kilmer on her incredible work.
- BoogieWoogie123 4y ago