Aulos: Greece musical instrument

An aulos or tibis was an old Greek wind musical instrument, portrayed often in art as well as attested by archaeology. An aulete was the musician that played the musical instrument. The ancient roman equivalent was the tibicen that was derived from the Latin word tibia meaning pipe. The neologism aulode is sometimes used by analogy with rhapsode and citharode to mean a player of the aulos, who may also be called an aulist.

source of picture: its-her-factory.blogspot.com

There were many types of the musical instrument. A single pipe without a reed was known as ‘monaulos’. A single pipe that is held horizontally, as the modern flute, was the ‘plagiaulos’. The most common version of the musical instrument must have been a reed musical instrument. Archeological finds, surviving pictures and other proofs indicate that it was often double reed, like an oboe, but simple version with a single clarinet-kind reed cannot be ruled out.

Though the musical instrument is wrongfully taken to be a flute, it was a reed musical instrument and the sound of the musical instrument is said to be penetrating, insisting and exciting, and it is more familiar to the bagpipe instruments, having a chanter and a drone. The aulos like the Great Highland Bagpipe have been used for martial melodies, but it is more often portrayed in social settings. The musical instrument is said to accompany physical activities like the wrestling match, broad jump, the discus throw and to mark the rowing cadence on the triremes, and also sacrifices and drama.

It appears that some versions of the musical instrument were loud, shrill and as such, very hard to play. A leather strap that is called ‘phorbeia’ in Greek was worn by the player of the instrument to prevent excessive strain on the lips and cheeks because of the continuous blowing of the instrument. Players of the musical instrument are sometimes portrayed with puffed cheeks. The playing pattern almost certainly made use of circular breathing, very much like the Sardinian launeddas that would give the musical instrument a continuous sound.

Though aristocrats with enough leisure sometimes practice the playing of the musical instrument as they did the lyre, after the later part 5^th century the aulos came to be chiefly linked with professional musicians, mostly slaves. Those slaves were achieving fame

In myth, marsyas the satyr was supposed to have fabricated the aulos, or else picked it up after Athena had thrown it away for the fact that it caused her cheek to puff and ruined her beauty. In any case, he challenged Apollo to a musical competition, where the winner would be able to do whatever he wanted to the loser having the expectation that it would be sexual in nature. But Apollo and his lyre beat Marsyas and his aulos. And since Apollo, the pure lord of Delphi’s mind worked in a different way than that of the Marsyas, he celebrated his victory by stringing his opponent up from a tree flaying him alive. King Midas got the ear of a donkey for judging Apollo to be the lesser player.

The sounds of the aulos are being digitally recreated by the Ancient Instruments Timbre/Sound Reconstruction Application (ASTRA) project that use physical modeling synthesis to simulate the sound of the musical instrument. Because of the complexity of this process, the ASTRA project uses grid computing to model sounds on hundreds of computer all round Europe.

The musical instrument is a part of the Lost Sound Orchestra, together with other old musical instruments that ASTRA have reconstructed their sounds, including the epigonion, the salpinx, the barbiton and the syrinx.