Recently I did some research to reconstruct the intervals in the scales of the Byzantine music (the old Byzantine music, not the modern Greek ecclesiastical music, although it turned out the scales are pretty much close). In order to satisfy my curiosity, when I completed my theory, I decided to play something using zynaddsubfx. And despite my poor musical abilities many friends asked me to give them the mp3s. This music is so much different from anything we hear today!

I played some modern ecclesiastical interpretation of the Byzantine music but in order to imagine the sounding of the real Byzantine music, you should know that the Byzantines considered the organ their national instrument. Two organs played simultaneously in the court of the Emperor. These organs however did not have a keyboard, so the playing style must have been similar to what is demonstrated in the the following clip on youtube: Persian piano solo.

The files are here:

http://lml.bas.bg/~anton/Byzantine/pachymeres-1.mp3
http://lml.bas.bg/~anton/Byzantine/pachymeres-2.mp3
http://lml.bas.bg/~anton/Byzantine/pachymeres-3.mp3
http://lml.bas.bg/~anton/Byzantine/pachymeres-5.mp3
http://lml.bas.bg/~anton/Byzantine/pachymeres-8.mp3

The file names are because the calculation of the intervals in the scales is based on information provided by the Byzantine scholar George Pachymeres (1242 – c.1310).