An Ancient Greek harp, which had been lost to the world, turns out to a fantastic argument for software sustainability.

At a conference last week, I talked to Domenico Vicinanza about the Epigonion: a kind of harp that was popular in Greece around the first century. None of the instruments have survived to the present day, so its existence was only known from historical records (such as the image shown on this page). It’s not just the instrument that has been lost, so have the skills and know-how needed to create one. This led Domenico’s team to set about a digital resurrection.

You can predict the sound an instrument will make if you know its characteristics: its size, shape and the materials used to create it. It’s far from easy to create this kind of model, and the result was so complex that it would take a standard desktop about 4 hours to reproduce a 30 second sample. Fortunately, Domenico works for GEANT who, together with the National Research and Education Networks, provide the network that links together European universities. Domenico’s team reproduced the sound of the Epigonion using grid computing, which harnessed the processing power of hundreds of computers across Europe.

Thanks to this work, and help from Astra project and the Lost Sounds Orchestra, the Epigonion can be heard for the first time in almost 2000 years (for example, this sample and this collaboration with a Baroque orchestra).

We now have a thoroughly modern problem: the Epigonion exists only as software. Software is intangible, because it doesn’t exist in a real sense, people tend to see it as persistent. That’s not the case, just like the original instruments, the digital Epigonion will decay unless effort is invested into its maintenance, such as keeping the software up to date with changes in hardware and any software on which it is reliant.

How do we ensure the future of software? Strangely enough, here at the Software Sustainability Institute, we’ve got a few resources on that very subject, including a description of the different approaches to software sustainability.