Analyzing music from ancient Greece and Rome, and the 100 days that shook science
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This is the Science Podcast for May 8th, 2025. I'm Sarah Crespi. First up, producer Megan Cantwell worked with the News From Science team to review how the first 100 days of the Trump administration have impacted science. In the segment, originally produced for video, we hear about how the workforce, biomedical research, and global health initiatives all face widespread, perhaps permanent damage.

Appearing in this segment are news staffers David Malikoff, Jocelyn Kaiser, and Rachel Bernstein. Next on the show, analysis of ancient music from Greece and Rome shows different musical notation styles for different instruments. Researcher Dan Basiu joins me to share some clips and also to talk about how the music of the time reflected the philosophy of the time.

There's been a constant stream of news in the first hundred days of the Trump administration. I'm Megan Cantwell, a producer here at Science, and I made a video featuring editors and reporters from our news staff that go over some of the impacts to science so far. I turn first to one of the editors who's been guiding coverage on this, David Malakoff. The first hundred days of the Trump administration have been an absolute whirlwind of chaos, confusion, and frankly also fear in the scientific community.

Every day, it's something new. It's something different. It's almost endless. But as a new staff, we sort of focused on three broad areas. One is the impact on the scientific workforce, both folks who work in the federal government, but also scientists who are supported by federal money. There's no question that this administration has acted much more aggressively to reduce the size of the federal workforce than almost any previous administration. Back in

In February, when we saw the first federal workforce cuts, they really went across the board. Within HHS, there's the National Institutes of Health, CDC and FDA, all of them saw cuts. And then also at a lot of the land management agencies, USGS, Forest Service.

Rachel Bernstein's an editor for the career section. She closely follows the people behind the research and what's going on in their communities. The workers that were cut in this initial round were probationary workers. So these were workers who in general had been at their agency in their current position for less than one or two years.

Since those initial probationary firings, there has been a lot of back and forth. Some of them have gotten their jobs back, some of them have not and are either still in limbo or are trying to figure out what their next steps are. After the probationary firings, we have seen extensive rifts or reductions in force across various agencies.

This is the more structured, regulated way that federal employees are able to be removed from their posts. A lot of the folks who lost their jobs have been shunned.

shocked and devastated. We've heard people say, you know, these were their dream jobs that they lost. That's really a testament to the strength of the workforce that existed prior to all of these cuts. Outside the federal workforce, we have researchers at

Institutions across the country who rely on federal funding and who are really struggling amidst all of the uncertainty and the grant cancellations, incoming graduate cohorts have been severely limited and even offers of admission have been rescinded.

I think the impacts of the current climate are certainly going to have a huge effect on the early career researchers, the trainees. There certainly are some folks who are thinking much more seriously about leaving research.

At the same time, I'm also seeing a lot of determination. There are a lot of folks who want to continue pushing through. International students are certainly another group that have been particularly vulnerable. And just in the last week or two, we've seen some administrative moves that have really put them even further at risk.

One of our reporters has talked to many of these students who are just feeling so discouraged and really betrayed they came here because this was supposed to be a place where they would be able to further their education in a way that they couldn't in their home country. And now their opportunities are just being taken away from them.

One of the other elements that's really making the community concerned about the next generation are cuts that we've been seeing to a lot of training programs.

We know that diversity of viewpoints is crucial for advancing scientific knowledge, that inclusion benefits everyone. I think for many of the researchers from the underrepresented groups, it's just been like a slap in the face to see a lot of that support

from not only the administration, but the scientific societies that have rewritten some of their websites or canceled DEI-related programs. I just don't want to lose track of the real human impact that

that this is taking on the research community. A second kind of broad area is what's going on in biomedical research, which is the largest area of spending by the federal government in science and has been disproportionately affected. The nature of some of the executive orders meant that NIH in particular was hit hard because the administration didn't want to fund research into diversity, equity and inclusion, LGBTQ issues.

NIH is the largest funder of research in the United States and the largest funder of biomedical research in the world. Jocelyn Kaiser handles a section of our website called Science Insider, which focuses on science policy and the international research community. Needless to say, she's had her hands pretty full with a ton of breaking news in the past few months.

She also reports on biomedical research and has been closely following all the changes to the National Institutes of Health. Most of its budget goes out to universities across the country as grants to fund research there. But NIH also has a really large research program on its campus. So I was on the NIH campus last week talking to NIH's in-house researchers. It was very grim. They're feeling under assault in many ways. This recent rift was getting rid of

support staff, like people who work in purchasing offices or HR or communications or IT. And so people told me that they can't

travel now because there's too much lead time is needed to get the trip approved. They can't buy things, reagents, for example, because there's nobody to process their order. Along with this White House proposal to cut the budget as NIH pretty dramatically, they also want to reorganize it. There are now 25 institutes and centers, and the White House has proposed a

collapsing them into eight and getting rid of at least four centers that study things like minority health and nursing, and they're not doing international research. So Asia just has said this is all part of a move towards efficiency and that they're going to centralize things like communications and purchasing, but they did not have a plan in place for these cuts. The grants we talked about before that go out to

academic researchers across the country. The Trump administration, several agencies announced that they were going to suspend $400 million in federal grants to Colombia because they wanted changes in Colombia's policies towards protesters who

They were very active on the campus last year protesting about Israel's bombardment of Gaza. Meanwhile, this is starting to happen at other major research universities like Harvard and University of Pennsylvania. There's a big list. If the university where it's happening does not find some money to keep the grant going or the project, then they may have to shut down and they may have to lay off staff.

At Columbia, the grants that were stopped, some of them did involve DEI or some of those sort of taboo topics. But at Harvard, some of the ones that have been in the news had nothing to do with the executive orders or those topics. They were infectious disease research, I think, studying the effects of radiation on the body. They had nothing to do with diversity or transgender research.

The third area, which was one of the first areas to feel the major impacts, was global health, how the United States supports all kinds of health activities all around the world. One of the first pieces of evidence we saw of Doge's influence was at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where Elon Musk famously announced on Twitter that they were going to feed the agency into a wood chipper.

And indeed, that's pretty much what they did. They canceled most of the contracts. They fired most of the staff. They hollowed out the agency where it basically exists in name only at this point. I think nobody really expected the onslaught that we've seen the last three months.

Martin Ensorink is an editor focused on global health. Before Trump took office, he anticipated that Trump would likely withdraw from the World Health Organization, but all the other actions that have ensued, like funding Ming-Kut to USAID and other NIH grants, have taken him by surprise.

This began in January with the so-called stop work orders. That's caused a lot of confusion and also a very immediate impact on the ground. People were suddenly without their medications. Clinical trials were halted, which people have pointed out is an ethical thing to do. USAID has been very important in global health. They spend on a vast variety of diseases, massive program for HIV/AIDS, for malaria.

tuberculosis, and then for many smaller diseases, and then things like pandemic prevention, malnutrition. Many programs have already been ended. People have to close down offices. People have modeled what this would mean for global health. And one recent preprint said there could be 25 million deaths in the next 15 years because of diseases like HIV, malaria, tuberculosis as a result of these cuts.

We have a story also about a comment in Nature that said that there could be about 370,000 deaths from malnutrition. So the impact is really

really severe. Whenever there's a famine, you see the planes landing, you see photos of big bags of food with the USAID logo on it and the slogan "From the American People." That was a powerful symbol of America's benevolence, if you will. And people see that being destroyed. Also, grants have been altered or canceled.

within the National Institutes of Health. NIH has now ended South Africa's participation in some clinical trial networks for HIV/AIDS. South Africa is the country with the largest number of people living with HIV in the world.

But it's also a country with a very solid research infrastructure. By ending that collaboration, NIH is depriving itself of a very important opportunity for research. Many organizations working in global health are looking for other funding.

funders. But the answer is there aren't many. European countries are already cutting down on foreign aid as well. So we're seeing sort of a global retreat almost from global health. This has all just happened in the first few months of the Trump administration, and there's still a lot of changes likely to come. Here are some of the things that our reporters and editors are looking out for in the upcoming year.

The first is going to be what the White House requests for the 2026 budget. They're expected to make that request in coming weeks. And we already know at some research agencies, they are going to ask Congress to make massive budget cuts. A second thing we're watching is the results of all these lawsuits. There are dozens and dozens of them, and we don't know where those are going to land yet. And that really brings us to the last big question, which is hovering over all of this.

Does this administration mark the end of what has essentially been a 75-year compact between the federal government and the research community? And essentially, that compact said, the government will take responsibility for funding basic research, research that may have no obvious application, that's curiosity-driven. And we're going to do that mostly at universities. It's produced tremendous innovation, huge amount of gross domestic product.

But the actions of this administration suggest that that compact is at minimum eroding and may be completely reconfigured in the years to come. Check out more stories on Trump's first 100 days, from profiles on researchers whose careers have been upended, to an inside look on what's happening at NIH at science.org slash podcasts.

Stay tuned for a conversation with researcher Dan Basiu, where we listen to some ancient music and talk about the relationship between music and philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome.

What did ancient music sound like? We have written music from Greece and Rome, but that's not always enough to recreate the sounds, even if we know what instruments they were using. This week in Science Advances, Dan Basu wrote about a mathematical analysis of 61 surviving compositions and what they can tell us about the sound of ancient music and how it reflects the philosophy of the time. And lucky for us, Dan has actually brought some music samples for us. Hi, Dan. Welcome to the Science Podcast. Hi, Sarah.

Thank you for having me. It was a big surprise. I'm happy to be here.

Good, good. This is such an interesting question. You know, we do know what instruments people were playing at the time. You can see it on the side of an urn. And we have written music from that time. But there's this kind of gap. What's missing between the evidence and the clues that we have now and the ability to perform these pieces and know what it sounded like? You have a piece of writing and to read it, you have to know a lot of things about what that writing exactly encodes.

And that is true for language, but it's also true for music and especially for music because music lives a lot from nuances, tiny modifications. I mean, if you hear a performer rehearse for something, they will create a lot of different variants and think, oh, this is better or is that better? It's a lot of work that goes from just reading a piece into how it actually sounds when it's performed. And the notation is different. How is that different?

It's actually quite interesting that in modern notation, we have sort of two systems. We have the keyboard system with A, B, C, D, and we have the solfeggio system, which is do, re, mi, fa, sol. So this is two different systems that are being used.

They don't match up with the old ones, but the old ones also, in antiquity, there were two systems of notation. At first, people believed, well, maybe they are the same or there's no big difference between the two. What differences did you notice in these two ancient notational styles? So I first played the pieces by themselves. And when playing them, I heard there's something really strange and I didn't know what it was. I felt like I was drifting out of tune in certain compositions.

I didn't know why. And then I started, you know, looking into which ones were those compositions. And I realized there were always vocal compositions. So I drifted out of tune and this was really annoying. And so this, some of the differences here is between which instrument it's written for. This more of a pipe like instrument versus a more stringed instrument.

Yeah, so there are two main instruments. If you look back in antiquity, people are drawn either with a type of lyre instrument, which has fixed strings, approximately seven. And there is the pipes. There are actually two pipes together. And they're also different compared to today. So if you think about, you know, in English, in the tradition, we call a recorder a pipe. It's used to make precise tones.

But in antiquity, people used the stringed instruments to actually record the exact frequencies of sound. So that was quite different. Oh, this pipe instrument, what I've seen in the drawings, it looks like you're holding two recorders in your mouth, like kind of like splayed apart. It's called an aulos or actually auloi because it's a plural. So it's two pipes and they have a reed inside. So they will sound more like an oboe or a clarinet. What?

Were you trying to figure out with your mathematical analysis exactly, like what details were you looking into? What kind of comparisons were you making? There is something, you know, that I have to introduce probably first so that it's properly understood. There's this whole idea about harmonics and harmony, but it's not just in music. And so maybe what I want to explain is very easily seen if I explain that with a different case. If you think about

urban life. So you are in a green wave in your car and you're driving through, but the whole city cannot just be a lot of green waves because you can't superimpose them together. At some point, they will not match up. And you mean that like when everybody's catching green lights going down a

a series of blocks. Yeah, you can like plan the traffic lights in such a way that when a car is passing through, it will always have green. But it can't be everybody, right? It can't be all the networks in the city having a green wave. That cannot be planned because there's too many different components. And music is just the same way. You cannot superimpose all kinds of frequencies together. So it's like, you know, a harmonic oscillator.

at some point you say superposition is not possible, and then it's a nonlinear oscillator that behaves really chaotically. And in music that happens as well. And so there are sequences of tones where the two each harmonize, but the whole sequence together doesn't. And if you look at the two notational styles in ancient Greece and Rome, you find that one style has music that's perfectly planned and as harmonic as it

can only be. Everything harmonizes. Whereas the other style is more performers have to make up during performance so that they would adjust for those small dissonances and these harmonies that would emerge just naturally because the composition is not thought through. Now, is there anything from the samples that you sent me that we should play next?

So I synthesized for you the sequence of tones that each work well together. So you have do, sol, re, fa, do, and you return to the same place. First, I play the sequence and then I play the first and last tone, which should be the same tone. But if you listen to it, it's not going to be the same tone. It's going to be a slight dissonance.

The first and last though, and it should be the same though, but actually they're slightly different because of this tiny difference. You have this effect of it's making, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me hear that one.

It's like five tones and they always match up together. The sequence returns to the place of departure, but it doesn't return to the exact same place. It returns off-tone. That's why the first and the last tone, which are played together in the end, which should be the same tone, but are not the same tone, and therefore they have an interference that is not harmonic. And so that makes this "wow wow" sound.

So the reason that the first and last don't match up is because, just you know for my math brain, plus one plus another one plus one minus one minus one minus one and somehow it doesn't match up when you get back? So people think of it on a piano and then it would be a fifth up and a third up so that makes eight and the fourth down and another fourth down would make zero. But that's not the case in harmonics because you have fractions so you have to multiply everything.

I've understood this. I'm amazed. And so at the end of the day, you get to a syntonic comma or Pythagorean comma. So this type of math was developed initially by the Greeks and, you know, in Roman times. And so you end up with a tiny fraction of 80 by 81 in this particular sequence, which is not exactly one. We can hear it even if it's a small amount. Exactly. Yeah. This is what our ears do. Yeah. So does this mean that the musician playing this would kind of have to

have this knowledge of what things are supposed to sound like, even if the music is telling the player to do something different? What would their capabilities need to be? So there are different amounts of inaccuracy that can emerge. It ranges up to like a quarter tone where, you know, the melody goes off tone. And so there's different ways of handling it in different musical traditions. If you look at music around the Mediterranean or Indian music, a bansuri, for example, would have a lot of

ornamentation where in the end you get to the right place. You play it a little bit, tiny swerve up or down with the voice and in the end everything works out. But not every instrument can do that. And so a piano or a lyre cannot do it. And a lyre, you know, you would hear that very clearly on it.

Is this something that you basically heard with your ear? The difference in the way these compositions sounded when they were played? Sometimes I'd speak to other people, like my parents. They have different hearing. One parent said, "Oh, I understand that." The other said, "I don't hear the difference at all." So then I was like, "All right, I need a way of testing it."

And then, you know, it's kind of easy today that, and I think that, you know, the ancients already had it. They were thinking of the sound being a vibration, sort of a beat pattern that's just very frequent. So we hear it as a tone.

but it's still a sort of a pattern or repeated striking. So that being a frequency. And so when you go up, it's a higher frequency down, a lower frequency. If you think about that, you come to the conclusion, all right, you can do all of the math to analyze the pieces themselves. And that's where the math comes from. And if you have the tones, then it's kind of obvious that

So you have to start with the obvious part. So an octave, it's clearly an octave. Equally with the dominant or a fifth, it's very clean and clear. A third, a fourth, those are clean intervals. So if you start with those, it's already becoming evident that the instrumental pieces always have a clean way of resolving the harmony.

And you look at the other ones, you figure, no, that's not possible to do. You were playing the pieces and you're like, oh, there's something going on. Then you put it into categories and then you kind of did music math, basically. You figured out music math says this is something you have to correct on the fly to make everything work out nicely. This is something that is written with the intention of

precision across the board. And so we have a couple of examples. I was thinking maybe first listening to the Berlin Papyrus composition. There is no guarantee that the tuning is perfect because I made it by the ear. Right. So. Okay, I'm going to play that and listen to it. Okay.

Okay, so that was from the Berlin Papyrus. What do we know about that piece? Like how old is it? Where is it from? It's a piece from Roman times. So that's like AD. So this is an instrumental piece, but it stays next to a vocal piece. And the instrumental piece is, you know, it's perfect. The harmonics is perfect.

And it also sounds, I'd say, you know, beautiful and harmonic and, you know, happy and playful. All right. Should we listen to one other one, though, that you have here? This is a piece from Greece, the Delphic Hymn by Lumenio. So this is a second century AD composition. It's three centuries apart from this one.

And you can see that it is not necessarily, you know, as happy, but it is still very perfect, very well detailed so that everything works out. And you can find a stone in Delphi in the museum. So if you happen to travel to Greece, go to the museum and look for the stone. You'll find it there. It's kind of nice to actually see it. ♪

That is very cool. So what are your kind of big takeaways from your analysis? What can you say about this kind of music that there's two kinds that one is precise and one is not precise? Is there anything more you can say?

I mean, I think it's interesting about the broader context of Greek antiquity and Roman antiquity and the philosophies they had. If you look at the temple, it's all just columns in a rectangular building, so it could be very boring, but actually it's very refined. Everything is slightly curved and everything is adjusted. And in the end it looks beautiful. And, you know, we think of the pillars of science being pillars like of a Greek temple. And sometimes, you know, you'd find that illustration very often.

And so a similar thing is found in atomism, where the world is composed out of these tiny particles that nobody can see. And they're small, but they're all almost the same or very similar. There are very few types. So this is an ancient Greek belief in atoms.

atoms today are named after those atoms, right? Right. I mean, the philosophy evolved a lot like every other philosophy, but it's probably one of, it's a philosophy that has a lot of time with it that's learned, you know, through millennia. Of course, what we call atoms today are not the smallest particles, but the main idea is there that there is some particles that are very stable and that change only very rarely. We can't see them. Yeah. And that they're

You can combine and recombine them like you would recombine letters in the alphabet. And what's kind of interesting is that music has that too. It has notes that can be combined and recombined. And so sometimes you can make them fit perfectly and everything is linear. But other times, if you want to reach that complexity, you just have to give up the basic constraints of harmonics and play it, you know, by the ear or by the voice.

It seems that in antiquity, musicians had observed that. And I wonder whether that's the same thing is observed in the philosophy about the atoms that sometimes to reach the complexity that we observe, that they would have to go off path. They would have to swerve a little bit. That's what Lucretius said. And it's kind of interesting to see that once again in ancient music where you see people consciously...

trying to limit that in a musical composition or let it be in another musical composition. Just some quantum effects, that's all. Yeah.

Can you tell me a little bit more about the body of compositions that you analyze here? You know, what is the span of time that you're talking about and what are some unique pieces in there? So the span is, I think the best earliest pieces are at the Paians by Lumenius. And it also has a vocal counterpart, which is not perfectly harmonic. Some of the latest are the other ones, the Berlin Papyrus. So that spans around three centuries. There are a couple of older pieces that

But there are more fragments, probably less interesting to study because they are less complete, but equally important to look at. So a total of around 60 fragments. Some have also multiple parts. So the Pian of Limanios will have 10 parts. Other compositions would be just, you know, one tone or one interval. Is there...

Music from even older times that's written down? The oldest piece of music that survives is from Ugarit, so which is in the ancient Near East. And I've recorded that for you as well. Oh, let's play that. ♪

And how old is that piece of music? So that's the second millennium BC. Oh my goodness. It's really hard to interpret it. So people don't really know how it would actually be interpreted. It has a text, but the text doesn't fit exactly with the music. It cannot be tuned perfectly, but I think it's still beautiful. You know, some of that sequence that comes...

It's actually also a sequence that you'd find in opera or in musical composition today. So it's not something that seems that unique. We kind of think of music as something we produce. It's like performed and it's written by a human, but

the biology of people is also engaged in this, even if it's not a conscious thing, right? So we're still people all the way back, multiple millennia. That's true. But what's nice about it is that if you think about one of the books about harmonics is from Ptolemy, and most of what he's written is wrong today. But harmonics, the main concepts of harmonics that he had, they're still sort of valid. So, you know, they speak

spearheaded acoustics and then pitches, frequencies, harmonics, interferences, that would be valid no matter where in the universe. Well, probably you'd have to have a planet, but you know...

Thanks, Dan. This has been a really interesting discussion. Thank you, Sarah. It's been amazing to be with you online today. Dan Basiu is a professor in the Munster School of Architecture at the Munster University of Applied Sciences. You can find a link to the Science Advances article we discussed at science.org slash podcast.

And that concludes this edition of the Science Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, write to us at [email protected]. To find us on podcasting apps, search for Science Magazine or listen on our website, science.org/podcast. This show was edited by me, Sarah Crespi, and Kevin MacLean. We had production help from Pataji.

Our music is by Jeffrey Cook and Wenkui Wen. On behalf of Science and its publisher, AAAS, thanks for joining us.