Descriptions of sounds in Attic dramas show the poets’ explicit willingness to awake and foster the audience’s imagination in response to noises, sounds and the evocation of specific types of songs. One can think, for instance, of the soundscapes of battles in tragedy (for instance, in Aeschylus’ Persae) on one side, and of representations of laments, cries, and also joyful expressions on the other. The latter are often linked with ‘musical irony’: one can think of the bitter ironic parody of the marriage song performed by Cassandra in Euripides’ Trojan Women (308-40, with Hecuba telling the women to “answer her wedding songs with tears”, 350-1).

As a matter of fact, metatheatrical effects (also presupposed in Plato’s criticism of “theatrocracy” in the Laws) such as addresses to the audiences (one for all, Athena’s address to the “Athenian people” in Aeschyl. Eum. 681) and the idea of space (conveyed through the relationship between voice and distance, cf. Soph. OT  1386-90) seem to highlight the ‘political’ aspect of attending performances, while animal sounds (moanings, bellows) aim at arousing the emotions. Such sounds must have been conveyed both by the language and by acoustic devices employed in musical instruments, and further strengthened by the place of the performance itself, that is, the theatrical building, since proper architectural acoustics can support and enhance speech and music communication over large public audiences.

Focusing on the Athenian drama, the aim of my paper is to analyze acoustic phaenomena within the theatre as a result of the relationship between audience and actors, also considering how the audiences’ perception of the acoustic phaenomena on the stage would have been oriented by peculiarities in the structures of musical instruments and in the architecture of theatres.