Very interesting article. It stimulates reflection on what the "soundscape" of the ancient Greeks could have been, that is, in which sounds and "noises" they might have been immersed. This meditation can generally apply to all past eras, more or less remote. I believe the most interesting aspect is imagining the different emotional perception that a sound or a series of sounds could trigger, compared to how we might perceive those same sounds, intervals, and melodies emotionally today. In the succession of eras, the association of emotional sensitivity has certainly changed, in line with the development of musical systems. This likely occurred (as the great Historian and Art Critic Federico Zeri states) also in figurative Art: in the perception of colors. The ancient Romans, for example, named colors red, green, yellow, etc.; to our eyes, these definitions related to those colors would no longer have a real correspondence. Human emotions are always the same; over time, the factors we perceive to trigger them vary.
The article is a bit cumbersome, with some somewhat technical terms that could have been spared, but the subject remains truly fascinating. This "soundscape," which I would call Soundscape, is actually shared with many other musical cultures. That is, okay, if we had more specific material perhaps we could give a more meticulous description, but if we rely generically on the difference between ancient and modern, the soundscape of Ancient Greece was similar to the soundscape of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Urbanized areas, non-urbanized areas, places where music had a constant presence (generally religious places or highly frequented places) and a strong link between music and education. Although we are talking about only descriptive documents, in fact, we must not forget that all the accounts we have say that music was part of everyone's upbringing. Did this make music more present than we can imagine? I don't know, but I think there are some anthropological constants that, by common sense, could also be applied to ancient eras. I believe it would be more than normal to imagine even mass consumption genres, people humming common melodies
