ἦχοι Λέσβου · the lyre of Mytilene · reconstructed
The Sapphic MelodySappho's lost mode — heard pure, and heard modern
No recording of antiquity exists and Sappho's tunes are lost — but the pitch-data survived. This is her music reconstructed from real ancient material: the Mixolydian mode (the scale Aristoxenus credited to her — "the intense one"), Pythagorean tuning, and the quantitative Sapphic metre, plucked on a synthesised lyre. Hear it pure; hear it modern, with a generated beat under the ancient line; or lay it over free live radio. Press play.
the Mixolydian, on the lyre — Sappho's own mode
tempo84 BPM
choose a genre — a free station loads, the lyre rides on top
station vollyre rides over it · set the tempo to match by ear
8-bit · the melody on the NES
The same Sapphic Mixolydian line, voiced on a synthesised 2A03 (the NES sound chip): two pulse channels — the duty-cycle squares — a triangle bass, and noise percussion. Pick a "level": each loops as a 10-second-plus snippet, and you can download any as a ~12-second .wav. Same ancient melody, eight chiptune dress-ups.
eight chiptune levels of Sappho's melody — pick one
what the melody is
The line is an evocation, not the lost original — a melodic contour composed in Sappho's mode and laid on her stanza: three hendecasyllables (– ‿ – × – ‿ ‿ – ‿ – –) and a closing adonean (– ‿ ‿ – –), long syllables ≈ twice a short. It rises through the Mixolydian to its characteristic ♭7 and resolves home to the tonic. The pitches are tuned the ancient way (whole tone 9:8, leimma 256:243 from a G lyre-tonic); the timbre is a Karplus-Strong pluck, generated live. Above is its shape — the melodic contour over the stanza.
what's real. the Mixolydian octave species, Pythagorean tuning, and the quantitative Sapphic metre are the documented ancient material (after the work of Aristoxenus & Cleonides). the lyre and every note are synthesised live in your browser — nothing downloaded. what's not. the specific melody is a faithful evocation in the right mode, tuning, and metre — not a surviving Sapphic tune (none survive with their notation). the "modern beat" is generated here in Sappho's key, so the ancient line and the groove are perfectly in time because both come from this page.
about Spotify & the radio. a webpage cannot read the audio of Spotify (Free has no streamable SDK at all — Premium-only, DRM) or of most web-radio (cross-origin streams block analysis), so it can't auto-extract their key or beat. honest design: the radio mode plays a real free station and lays the lyre over it, and you lock the lyre's tempo by ear with the slider or the tap button — no fake auto-sync. stations come from the open Radio-Browser directory (no login).