Veena

The ancient strings sing as the master player pinches and pokes them into life, causing every muscle in his body to vibrate with the tones of a thousand year old melody. Your mind is immediately set adrift, as answers you have been searching for your whole life begin to drop out of the sky like little clouds called down by the power of music. The veena has a recorded history that dates back to the Vedic period, approximately 1500 BCE. In ancient times, the tone vibrating from the hunter's bow string when he shot an arrow was known as the Vil Yazh. The Jya ghosha (musical sound of the bow string) is referred to in the ancient Atharvaveda. Eventually, the archer's bow paved the way for the musical bow. Twisted bark, strands of grass and grass root, vegetable fibre and animal gut were used to create the first strings. Over the veena's evolution and modifications, more particular names were used to help distinguish the instruments that followed. The word veena in India was a term originally used to generally denote "stringed instrument", and included many variations that would be either plucked, bowed or struck for sound. The veena instruments developed much like a tree, branching out into instruments as diverse as the exotic harp-like Akasa (a veena that was tied up in the tops of trees for the strings to vibrate from the currents of wind) and the Audumbari veena (played as an accompaniment by the wives of Vedic priests as they chanted during ceremonial Yajnas). Veenas ranged from one string to one hundred, and were composed of many different materials like eagle bone, bamboo, wood and coconut shells. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=125655