New music label bringing to life lost tunes of prehistory

A Yorkshire academic is helping to bring to life music and instruments used in prehistoric caves and ancient ampitheatres as part of a £3.5m research project.

Dr Rupert Till is one a team of researchers who have developed the European Music Archaeology Project (EMAP).

The lecturer from Huddersfield University – who has already worked on a project to recreate the acoustics of Stonehenge – will visit historic venues in Rome and Greece to make recordings.

Researchers will use archaeological remains and ancient pictures to recreate the instruments they believe our ancestors will have played.

Dr Till will develop a record label to produce this music and will also create a “digital time machine” to be used in an exhibition which will take visitors back through history giving them a chance to listen to music of the time.

He said: “You can’t really know what music sounded like thousands of years ago. But you can produce music that demonstrates the instruments and some of the techniques used.”

One of the main aims of the research is to create a travelling exhibition – which will include the virtual time machine.

Dr Till added: “You will enter this space and start with a cave in Spain, hearing a bone 
flute.

“Then perhaps you will travel to Stonehenge and see someone playing instruments there.

“You will go forward in time to Greece and hear instruments played in reconstructed acoustics and spaces.

“EMAP is going to be a high- quality, high impact project and it’s expected that the exhibition will be seen by one-and-a-half-million people,”

Dr Till has also received £100,000 funding from the 
UK’s Art and Humanities Research Council to 
study the acoustics of the Altamira prehistoric cave system in Spain.