Forgotten Bach Instrument Recreated

Three hundred years after its last sounding, a long-lost instrument called the lituus -- one of Johann Sebastian Bach's go-to horns -- is back from the dead.

According to the BBC's report, no one alive today has ever heard, seen or read descriptions of the real deal. Experts recently pegged it, however, as a long, trumpet-like instrument similar to that used by Romans and medieval people.

To reproduce it, historians chipped in accounts of similar instruments, Bach-fanatic musicians gave their best guesses as to what it might have sounded like, and University of Edinburgh engineers plugged the data into modern brass instrument-improving software.

The result: An 8.5-foot wooden tube that professional musicians describe as giving a "haunting" quality to music.

Not surprising when you consider a grave-side funeral song by Bach, called O Jesu Christ, mein's Lebens Licht ("Oh Jesus Christ, my life's light"), is the last known composition the lituus was written into.

Hear it here.