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, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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

If you don’t lis­ten to rap, you’ve heard the same ques­tions over and over in response to that con­fes­sion. One of the most com­mon is “But have you heard De La Soul?” — which in recent years was eas­i­er said than done, at least on stream­ing plat­forms. “What kept De La’s tunes out of rota­tion was a frus­trat­ing morass of out­dat­ed con­tracts and record label par­si­mo­ny,” writes Oliv­er Wang at NPR. One com­pli­ca­tion had to do with sam­pling, a stan­dard hip hop prac­tice con­duct­ed in such a far-reach­ing, free­wheel­ing, and elab­o­rate man­ner by De La Soul that the prospect of rene­go­ti­at­ing each and every son­ic snip­pet they’d cleared in the CD-and-tape era inspired untold cor­po­rate intran­si­gence.

But as of this month, “all this has final­ly been rec­ti­fied. The group’s most impor­tant record­ings are now legal­ly avail­able on the inter­net.” None of them is more impor­tant than their debut, 3 Feet High and Ris­ing, orig­i­nal­ly released in 1989 and added to the Library of Con­gress’ Nation­al Record­ing Reg­istry in 2010.

As Wang writes, the album “reshaped the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion of what hip-hop could be. The core trio — Pos­d­nu­os, Tru­goy and DJ Pase­mas­ter Mase — assist­ed by mentor/producer Prince Paul all came straight out­ta the wilds of sub­ur­ban Long Island, rap­ping about advice-spout­ing croc­o­diles, Mar­t­ian trans­mis­sions, and an artis­tic meta-con­cept they dubbed The D.A.I.S.Y. (Da Inner Soul, Y’all) Age.”

Clear­ly, De La Soul had a set of artis­tic pri­or­i­ties all their own. “Sam­ple-hun­gry rap pro­duc­ers had spent the pre­vi­ous few years min­ing the James Brown and P‑Funk cat­a­logs and though De La sam­pled from both on their debut, they were more like­ly to cre­ate mem­o­rable musi­cal moments from chil­dren’s tele­vi­sion songs (‘The Mag­ic Num­ber’), obscure doo-wop sin­gles (‘Plug Tunin”) and clas­sic ’80s pop hits (‘Say No Go’),” to say noth­ing of a learn-at-home French record. The first time I remem­ber hear­ing De La Soul was when an ear­ly-morn­ing col­lege-radio DJ put on the 3 Feet High track “Eye Know,” which sam­ples Steely Dan — as well as the Mad Lads, Lee Dorsey, and Otis Red­ding.

As if 3 Feet High and Ris­ing weren’t enough of a cav­al­cade of won­ders, it comes as only one of six De La Soul albums new­ly avail­able to stream. On the group’s offi­cial Youtube chan­nel and oth­er stream­ing plat­forms, you can also hear De La Soul Is Dead (1991), Buhloone Mind­state (1993), Stakes Is High (1996), and the Art Offi­cial Intel­li­gence pair Thump and Bion­ix (2001), each of which marks an expan­sion of the group’s already con­sid­er­able ambi­tions. They all join the already-stream­able albums released over the twen­ty years up to the death of found­ing mem­ber David “Tru­goy” Joli­coeur last month, an event that may put end to De La Soul as a record­ing enti­ty. But if you do lis­ten through their expan­sive and inven­tive body of work, be pre­pared for anoth­er ques­tion: have you heard A Tribe Called Quest?

Relat­ed con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Hip Hop Music Visu­al­ized on a Turntable Cir­cuit Dia­gram: Fea­tures 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West

How Jazz Became the “Moth­er of Hip Hop”

150 Songs from 100+ Rap­pers Get Art­ful­ly Woven into One Great Mashup: Watch the “40 Years of Hip Hop”

How Sam­pling Trans­formed Music and Cre­at­ed New Tapes­tries of Sound: An Inter­ac­tive Demon­stra­tion by Producer/DJ Mark Ron­son

The Birth of Hip Hop: How DJ Kool Herc Used Turnta­bles to Change the Musi­cal World (1973)

Enter the The Cor­nell Hip Hop Archive: A Vast Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion of Hip Hop Pho­tos, Posters & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Com­ing after the mat­u­ra­tion of the mar­ket for high-fideli­ty stereo sys­tems but before the advent of home video, the nine­teen-sev­en­ties pro­vid­ed just the right cul­tur­al and eco­nom­ic con­di­tions for a hero­ic age of the record album. What’s Going On, Blue, Blood on the Tracks, Exile on Main Street, Born to Run, Rumours, Aja: that these and oth­er sev­en­ties releas­es always rank high on best-of-all-time lists can be no acci­dent. But no oth­er mega-sell­ing album of that decade achieved quite the com­bi­na­tion of com­mer­cial and crit­i­cal suc­cess as Pink Floy­d’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which was orig­i­nal­ly released fifty years ago yes­ter­day — and which remains on the Bill­board charts today.

“In 1973, Pink Floyd was a some­what known pro­gres­sive rock band,” writes neu­ro­sci­en­tist and music pro­duc­er Daniel Lev­itin, but The Dark Side of the Moon “cat­a­pult­ed them into world class rock-star sta­tus.”

Its mas­ter­ful engi­neer­ing “pro­pelled the music off of any sound sys­tem to become an all-encom­pass­ing, immer­sive expe­ri­ence” com­pris­ing songs that “flow into one anoth­er sym­phon­i­cal­ly, with seam­less musi­cal coher­ence, as though writ­ten as part of a sin­gle melod­ic and har­mon­ic ges­ture. Lyric themes of mad­ness and alien­ation con­nect through­out,” enlivened by an “array of new elec­tron­ic sounds, spa­tial­iza­tion, pitch and time bend­ing” as well as “clocks, alarms, chimes, cash reg­is­ters, foot­steps” and oth­er ele­ments not nor­mal­ly heard in rock music.

This descrip­tion comes from an essay Lev­itin wrote for the Library of Con­gress in 2012, when The Dark Side of the Moon was induct­ed into the US Nation­al Record­ing Reg­istry. For the album’s fifti­eth anniver­sary, Nation­al Pub­lic Radio’s Morn­ing Edi­tion invit­ed him to psy­cho­an­a­lyze it on-air. “Themes of mad­ness and alien­ation per­me­ate the record,” he says, mak­ing ref­er­ence to the sto­ry of depart­ed Pink Floyd mem­ber Syd Bar­rett. But “we can’t know for sure which spe­cif­ic lyrics were about Bar­rett, as opposed, more gen­er­al­ly, to men­tal anguish,” a con­di­tion bound to afflict any­one too deep into the rock-star lifestyle.

In The Dark Side of the Moon’s lyrics Lev­itin hears Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters’ metaphor­i­cal treat­ment of the dif­fi­cult deci­sion to fire Bar­rett, as well as his real­iza­tion that “life was­n’t going to start lat­er. It had start­ed. And the idea of ‘Time’ was to grasp the reins and start guid­ing your own des­tiny.” As on the album as a whole, the theme comes through in not just the words but the sound­scape: “Right off the bat, they’re play­ing with time. You hear that clop-clop sound, like a heart­beat or a clock tick­ing. And you think that the high­er-pitched one is the down­beat. But as soon as the instru­ments come in, you real­ize you’re off the beat, and every­thing’s upside down. And your sense of time is dis­tort­ed.”

Musi­cal artistry accounts in part for the album’s mas­sive suc­cess in part, but only in part. Storm Thorg­er­son­’s icon­ic cov­er art, still seen on the walls of col­lege dorm rooms today, also had some­thing to do with its suc­cess as both cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non and con­sumer prod­uct. But it could hard­ly have sold more than 45 mil­lion copies to date with­out chanc­ing to hit the zeit­geist at a favor­able angle: as Pink Floyd drum­mer Nick Mason said, it was “not only about being a good album but also about being in the right place at the right time.” And with the hero­ic age of the album long over, The Dark Side of the Moon — a new­ly re-record­ed ver­sion of which Waters announced just this year — isn’t about to be eclipsed.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Pink Floyd’s Entire Stu­dio Discog­ra­phy is Now on YouTube: Stream the Stu­dio & Live Albums

The Dark Side of the Moon Project: Watch an 8‑Part Video Essay on Pink Floyd’s Clas­sic Album

Watch Doc­u­men­taries on the Mak­ing of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here

Down­load Pink Floyd’s 1975 Com­ic Book Pro­gram for The Dark Side of the Moon Tour

A Live Stu­dio Cov­er of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Played from Start to Fin­ish

“The Dark Side of the Moon” and Oth­er Pink Floyd Songs Glo­ri­ous­ly Per­formed by Irish & Ger­man Orches­tras

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.