The Sound of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Abstract Created when ancient Greek poetry was primarily composed, performed, and experienced through oral traditions, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter reflects and preserves within its words elements of its soundscape as a performed song and the memories/emotions/reactions that it would have triggered in its audience. The intonational patterns of the Greek words and phrases encoded within the text’s accentuation, when they were expressed through the performer’s voices, could have served as cues for the listeners’ imagination and cultural memory. This paper aims to introduce a method of reconstructing melodic/tonal contours of the HH2 from the accentuation in the text and to illustrate the possible use of these melodic contours to characterise certain aspects of the sonic environment of the performed hymn. By analysing examples from the text, including sound descriptions and dialogues, this paper illustrates how sound and speech-melody, as reflected in the melodic contours, connect to the poem’s semantic content.