In the ear­ly 1950s, archae­ol­o­gists unearthed sev­er­al clay tablets from the 14th cen­tu­ry BCE. Found, WFMU tells us, “in the ancient Syr­i­an city of Ugar­it,” these tablets “con­tained cuneiform signs in the hur­ri­an lan­guage,” which turned out to be the old­est known piece of music ever dis­cov­ered, a 3,400 year-old cult hymn. Anne Draf­fko­rn Kilmer, pro­fes­sor of Assyri­ol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, pro­duced the inter­pre­ta­tion below in 1972. (She describes how she arrived at the musi­cal notation—in some tech­ni­cal detail—in this inter­view.) Since her ini­tial pub­li­ca­tions in the 60s on the ancient Sumer­ian tablets and the musi­cal the­o­ry found with­in, oth­er schol­ars of the ancient world have pub­lished their own ver­sions.

The piece, writes Richard Fink in a 1988 Arche­olo­gia Musi­calis arti­cle, con­firms a the­o­ry that “the 7‑note dia­ton­ic scale as well as har­mo­ny exist­ed 3,400 years ago.” This, Fink tells us, “flies in the face of most musi­col­o­gists’ views that ancient har­mo­ny was vir­tu­al­ly non-exis­tent (or even impos­si­ble) and the scale only about as old as the Ancient Greeks.”

Kilmer’s col­league Richard Crock­er claimed that the dis­cov­ery “rev­o­lu­tion­ized the whole con­cept of the ori­gin of west­ern music.” So, aca­d­e­m­ic debates aside, what does the old­est song in the world sound like? Lis­ten to a midi ver­sion below and hear it for your­self. Doubt­less, the midi key­board was not the Sume­ri­ans instru­ment of choice, but it suf­fices to give us a sense of this strange com­po­si­tion, though the rhythm of the piece is only a guess.

Kilmer and Crock­er pub­lished an audio book on vinyl (now on CD) called Sounds From Silence in which they nar­rate infor­ma­tion about ancient Near East­ern music, and, in an accom­pa­ny­ing book­let, present pho­tographs and trans­la­tions of the tablets from which the song above comes. They also give lis­ten­ers an inter­pre­ta­tion of the song, titled “A Hur­ri­an Cult Song from Ancient Ugar­it,” per­formed on a lyre, an instru­ment like­ly much clos­er to what the song’s first audi­ences heard. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, for that ver­sion, you’ll have to make a pur­chase, but you can hear a dif­fer­ent lyre inter­pre­ta­tion of the song by Michael Levy below, as tran­scribed by its orig­i­nal dis­cov­er­er Dr. Richard Dum­b­rill.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014. It’s old but gold. So we hope you enjoy revis­it­ing it again.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia

Down­load 10,000 of the First Record­ings of Music Ever Made, Cour­tesy of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia-San­ta Bar­bara 

Above, Snarky Pup­py drum­mer Lar­nell Lewis explains drum­ming in 13 lev­els of dif­fi­cul­ty, from easy to com­plex, show­ing how “drum tech­niques build upon each oth­er as the eas­i­est lev­els incor­po­rate the hi-hat, bass and snare drums, and more dif­fi­cult lev­els include polyrhythms, the floor tom, ride cym­bals, syn­co­pa­tion and much more.” It’s fun to watch. In anoth­er video from the same series pro­duced by Wired mag­a­zine, musi­cian Jacob Col­lier explains the con­cept of har­mo­ny with increas­ing dif­fi­cul­ty to five dif­fer­ent peo­ple– a child, a teen, a col­lege stu­dent, a pro­fes­sion­al, and jazz leg­end Her­bie Han­cock. Enjoy…

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

What Makes John Bon­ham Such a Good Drum­mer? A New Video Essay Breaks Down His Inim­itable Style

The Case for Why Ringo Starr Is One of Rock’s Great­est Drum­mers

The Health Ben­e­fits of Drum­ming: Less Stress, Low­er Blood Pres­sure, Pain Relief, and Altered States of Con­scious­ness

First released in 1984, Jonathan Dem­me’s acclaimed con­cert film Stop Mak­ing Sense fea­tured the Talk­ing Heads at the height of their cre­ative and musi­cal pow­ers. The film starts with David Byrne, alone on a bare stage, with a boom­box and his big white suit, per­form­ing “Psy­cho Killer.” Then, with each new song, he’s joined by dif­fer­ent band­mates and an assem­blage of gear and lights, all show­ing, step-by-step, how a con­cert gets made. It’s an inven­tive film. And it’s com­ing back to the­aters this August, restored no less in 4K res­o­lu­tion.

Above, in the offi­cial trail­er, watch Byrne retrieve his over­sized suit from the dry clean­ers some 40 years late, then try it on for size. Turns out, it still fits.…

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

How Jonathan Demme Put Human­i­ty Into His Films: From The Silence of the Lambs to Stop Mak­ing Sense

Talk­ing Heads Live in Rome, 1980: The Con­cert Film You Haven’t Seen

Talk­ing Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” Per­formed on Tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese Instru­ments

Talk­ing Heads Songs Become Mid­cen­tu­ry Pulp Nov­els, Mag­a­zines & Adver­tise­ments: “Burn­ing Down the House,” “Once in a Life­time,” and More

Released 40 years ago this week, New Order’s “Blue Mon­day” (hear the orig­i­nal EP ver­sion here) became, accord­ing to the BBC, “a cru­cial link between Sev­en­ties dis­co and the dance/house boom that took off at the end of the Eight­ies.” If you fre­quent­ed a dance club dur­ing the 1980s, you know the song.

The orig­i­nal “Blue Mon­day” nev­er quite won me over. I’m much more Rolling Stones than New Order. But I’m tak­en with the adap­ta­tion above. Cre­at­ed by the “Orkestra Obso­lete,” this ver­sion tries to imag­ine what the song would have sound­ed like in 1933, using only instru­ments avail­able at the time— for exam­ple, writes the BBC, the theremin, musi­cal saw, har­mo­ni­um and pre­pared piano. Quite a change from the Pow­ertron Sequencer, Moog Source syn­the­siz­er, and Ober­heim DMX drum machine used to record the song in the 80s. Enjoy this lit­tle thought exper­i­ment put into action.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Radiooooo: A Musi­cal Time Machine That Lets You Hear What Played on the Radio in Dif­fer­ent Times & Places

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Meet the “Tel­har­mo­ni­um,” the First Syn­the­siz­er (and Pre­de­ces­sor to Muzak), Invent­ed in 1897