David Smith

Yes! I don't understand music beyond "sound good" so I can't comment on most of the paper. However, the appendix is sus

this is so cool! I do like mysterious undeciphered tablets and the oldest music in existence

I appreciate that you academia'd so hard that you now post in serif font on cohost

edit: not to disparage the frankly incredible work here but that keyboard on page 4 is mildly infuriating. I had to really study it to realize it started on an G, my brain kept on reading it CDECDEFGA...pls be kind and only split keyboards on either BC or EF when possible. Or at least end it on a black key instead of a white one, this would read a lot easier if I could see even just the cutout of F# on the G. apologies for what's honestly a trivial complaint lol

edit 2: I'm pretty much speechless. This is a fantastic topic and I'm very glad to have read it. It's not without some intrigue, as you noted the lack of perfect fifths is weird, but I think the musicality of it is impeccable. Only having eleven tones is pretty much not odd at all for this timeframe haha, it would have been more concerning if they had 12, fits a little too neatly into the modern equal temperament musical system.

edit 3: I'm gonna have to think for a while about the lack of fifths, it feels like something's missing. As a fallback, it could very much be an artistic choice, especially if these tablets likely have the same author? Deliberately avoiding such an appealing interval for a certain flavor isn't that odd, it kinda sucks that we don't have a larger corpus of music to help see whether these pieces are typical for the time frame. but you know, that's a common lament in this field haha

oh wow! this is such a fascinating idea. Bookmarking that one to come back to :3