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I hope you’ll consider uploading some more in the future! Maybe there’ll come a point where you could even contribute something to the Hotel’s soundtrack yourself!

That's the plan! I'd like to record some songs for the game and if all goes well I'll include at least one in the next build. I feel like I'm skilled enough to be satisfactory, but I still need to improve my recording setup.

I figured I had some minutes to spare now and quickly recorded an attempt of the Seikilos Epitaph as we play it in the game. Again, bad microphone setup, next to no editing, all recorded in one take and after spending a week not practicing, so there are quite a few stumbles and weird noises.

View on Vocaroo >>

This uses my lyre, a big boy that's closer to a bass lyre/barbiton.

Now, regarding the Minoan-esque lyre... I haven't received it yet, but the luthier sent me a sample of what it sounds like.

View on Vocaroo >>

When I receive it I plan on recording the same Seikilos Epitaph song with my big lyre, this new one and a Luthieros one I have access to. You will be surprised how different they sound, and you will come to understand on a deeper level why I'm so happy with the Minoan-esque lyre having an accessible price tag. To put it bluntly, a lyre this small and cheap has no business sounding this good when you compare it with the expensive Luthieros one. I'll say no more on this regard, and let you reach your own conclusions when I record the same song with the same recording equipment with these three instruments.

And, FYI, I can say with a lot of experience that your suspicions about Luthieros' durability are completely justified. I won't go in details here, suffice it to say that some of the issues I've seen with them informed my decision to make resilience and durability a priority in this lyre.


But if you, as a modern person immersed in Minoan culture, could think of that, what would have stopped *an actual Minoan* from thinking the same? We may not have any evidence of an instrument like this, but it seems a little unreasonable to think that, over the thousands of years of Minoan culture, a Minoan musician didn’t at least have the idea, and experiment with it. Maybe that hypothetical experiment wasn’t successful, or the instruments weren’t sturdy enough to survive, or ended up being show-pieces that were never used, or sacred instruments that ended up being destroyed, or the whole idea was taboo from a religious standpoint, so the instruments never really saw the light of day. There are many possibilities.

Yes, I fully agree with your thought process. When I was in Crete I saw it in almost mathematical terms: the horns of consecration as a motif were present in some of the earliest and most rudimentary clay pottery found in Crete, and were absolutely overwhelming in their frequency in some places. This was a symbol they used in all sorts of places and occasions, be it in architecture, funerary rites and even daily tools. We can only speculate about its importance, but given how often it was used... I mean, it's plausible that they would have made many things using that shape, which just happens to be perfect for a lyre.

I'd put my money on someone, at some point, having made an instrument like this.

I plan on including this lyre in the game, in Chapter 20. I don't want to give spoilers but I can say that Asterion, like any artist, experimented across the centuries and built some lyre prototypes which haven't been shown in the chapters so far. And I plan on giving this lyre some history inside the game's story.

Incidentally: it will be really funny if at some point in the future someone discovers that the Minoans did make lyres like this and they look back on it being independently developed as a speculative exercise for a minotaur-fucking gay game. That will be one hell of a story.

After all, if the only trumpets one could buy were toy plastic trumpets, or trumpets made out of platinum-infused gold, who on earth would play the trumpet?

Let me just show you what's the situation here...

All those cheaper lyres use metal strings and my experience is that they just keep ringing for so long, it really muddles up the song, and they are often built in a way that you can't even play all the strings with both hands. My first lyre was one built in this style and I pretty much stopped playing after a few months because of how limited and unsatisfactory it felt.

This will be it for now, I've got to go back to writing. I might add some more later, but for now bye bye!