They are some of Scotland's best loved songs, played regularly in pubs and social clubs throughout the country.

But after decades of adaptations, the original versions of the songs of Robert Burns are not quite as instantly recognisable.

Burns afficionados at Glasgow University have stripped the tunes back to how they originally sounded - and the result is very different to those popular melodies regularly heard over a pint.

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While the poet's songs are usually associated with a fiddle, guitar and accordion, the original music was tailored for the parlours of the middle classes, performed on Baroque harpsichords, cellos and violas.

Professor Kirsteen McCue, who led the research for the University’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies, said: "People don’t really know what Burns’ songs sounded like because the songs have been taken out of context and have become what they are today which is a bit of everything. So it’s all about the context of the time.

"We have gone right back to the very first publications of those collections, which are very beautiful musical editions with music and text. They were quite expensive at the time and we wanted to explore what it would have meant for people in Burns’ day to have bought these songs.

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"They were generally marketed either to be on the shelf as a repository of Scots’ songs or to be played by people in their front rooms.

"The piano was relatively new in Scotland. People were learning to play the piano, harpsichord and stringed instruments, so these publications were for people to have a go at playing at home."

The recordings by the Centre for Robert Burns Studies involved bringing together a group of 11 young musicians and singers, some who already knew Burns songs and some who had never worked with his music before, and they were each given copies of the original publications from 1787 until the 1830s.

They were then asked to build a performance from what they could read on paper.

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Ms McCue added that many Burns fans may not find the new recordings easy listening.

"We are opening up a bit of a controversial area and not everyone will like these settings," she said. "But we have not recorded them so people will like them we have recorded them because that is what they are.

"It does sound very different and that is something which can be unattractive for the vast majority of Burns lovers who just want the melody, they just want a singer with a fiddle and the songs work beautifully that way, there’s no denying often they work best that way, but that’s not how they originally appeared."