EUMEDCONNECT2 Supports e-Culture

 The preservation of cultural heritage by digital means is an effective way of helping retain and curate important elements of culture before they disappear for ever. EUMEDCONNECT2 can play an important role in facilitating this.

Find out more about how EUMEDCONNECT2 helps reconstruct lost sounds of ancient instruments in the description of the ASTRA project below.

EUMEDCONNECT2 provides multimedia access to distributed collections of cultural heritage objects supports digitalisation of cultural heritage and thus helps retain and curate it

Case Study

ASTRA: reviving lost sounds of ancient instruments

 Tapping into the huge computing power of the EUMEDCONNECT and GÉANT2 networks, the ASTRA project (Ancient instruments Sound/Timbre Reconstruction Application) has managed to recreate the sounds of the harp-like Epigonion musical instrument from Ancient Greece. Using archaeological findings, historical pictures and literature, researchers used an advanced physical modelling technique to create a virtual model of the instrument and reproduce the sound that the instrument would have made. This physical modelling process requires extreme amounts of computing power – taking about four hours for a high-powered computer to reproduce correctly a sound lasting only 30 seconds. To bring together sufficient power, the ASTRA project used the GILDA and EUMEDGRID grid computing infrastructures, which link computing resources across the Mediterranean through the EUMEDCONNECT and GÉANT2 research networks. The aim of the ASTRA project is to create a sound library of ancient instruments that will be available for historians, musicians and students to study the musical sounds of the past. The successor network EUMEDCONNECT2 will play a major role in making this happen.