Here's my take on this: either the author or the BBC has simplified what is really going on, because we actually know a lot more about Ancient Greek Music than

Here's my take on this: either the author or the BBC has simplified what is really going on, because we actually know a lot more about Ancient Greek Music than this article suggests. Most importantly (I think), ancient music is not (only) preserved in the words themselves (i.e. by vowel length and things like that). There is also a lot of evidence for musical notation, which has been preserved both in the papyrus tradition (where we have lines of tragic verse with the actual notes transcribed above - you can see an example here: http://classics.uc.edu/music/ http://classics.uc.edu/music/), as well as from discussions of ancient music by the ancients themselves, e.g. Plutarch's 'On Music'