E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
Stanford University
A researcher sounds a note on a conch-shell trumpet as part of an experiment to re-create the ceremonial calls heard by ancient Andeans in the Chavin de Huantar ceremonial center in Peru.
Ancient peoples around the world seem to have designed their sacred spaces not only for ceremonial sights, but for ceremonial sounds as well, archaeologists say.
In Peru, for example, a 3,000-year-old Andean ceremonial center's design was optimized for the blare of a priest's conch-shell trumpet. In Mexico, the Chichen Itza temple site features a staircase that can make hand claps sound like the chirp of a quetzal bird. And one of the best-known ancient monuments of all, England's Stonehenge, has a layout that's acoustically pleasing as well as astronomically significant.
The big question is, did ancient societies really have acoustics in mind when they built their monuments?
"That is a challenge," said David Lubman, a California-based acoustical scientist and consultant. Much of the evidence is circumstantial, or based on interpretations of ancient myths. But when the acoustical resonances fit so well with the purpose of a ceremonial space, it's hard to resist making a connection.
"Whether or not you have historical evidence, you have another form of evidence," said Miriam Kolar, a researcher at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
Theater for the ears
Researchers discussed their efforts to unravel the mysteries of ancient acoustics today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Vancouver, British Columbia.
For the past few years, Kolar and her colleagues have been focusing on Chavin de Huantar, a pre-Inca site in Peru that served as a regional religious center. People apparently came to a circular plaza to worship, and to hear an oracle's pronouncements issuing from a stone gallery.
The acoustic musicians of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics help archaeologists unravel the mysteries of the pre-Inca Chavin temple complex - and the ritual role given to the conch.
The Stanford team conducted a detailed acoustical study of the gallery's cross-shaped passageways. They found that the central duct between the gallery and the plaza would serve as an acoustic filter system, accentuating the tones produced by the priests' ceremonial conch trumpets, known as "pututus."
"There was theater going on," Kolar said. The thrilling effect of the trumpet calls and the oracle's words may well have been heightened by the psychoactive effects of the San Pedro cactus that the Chavin people consumed during their rituals.
The chirping staircase
There are theatrical touches as well at Chichen Itza, a Maya temple complex going back more than 1,000 years, Lubman said. One of the most prominent monuments is the Temple of Kukulkan, also known as El Castillo: Some researchers have argued that the temple's staircase was constructed so as to create a "feathered serpent" shadow during the spring and autumn equinoxes. Lubman says the staircase can produce an aural as well as a visual effect: When you clap your hands at just the right spot, the echo comes back sounding much like the chirp of the quetzal bird, which was sacred to the Maya.
The acoustician played an audio clip demonstrating that the bird's chirp and the clap's echo sounded remarkably similar. He speculated that a priest might have clapped his hands loudly to seek counsel from a quetzal. Worshipers would have been impressed to hear the chirp of a spectral bird, apparently coming from inside the temple. "Only priests were trained to interpret what the quetzal said," Lubman said, half-jokingly.
Lubman has been studying Chichen Itza's acoustics for more than a decade. That's such a long time that the quetzal research "should be old news," he said. "But the darn bird keeps chirping." He noted that Chichen Itza has another interesting acoustic feature: Its ball court is designed like a "whispering gallery," so that a low utterance in one corner of the court could be heard clearly in another corner.
The bottom line? Maybe the ancient Maya were more in tune with sacred sounds than we are today. "Now, many things go through our eyes before they get to our minds, but that wasn't true in the ancient world," he said.
A visitor to Chichen Itza demonstrates the "quetzal clap."
The Stone Age and Stonehenge
Steven Waller, a researcher at California-based Rock Art Acoustics, theorized that acoustics may even have had something to do with the placement of the stones at Stonehenge, a monument that's at least 5,000 years old. "What struck me was that the layout of Stonehenge reminded me of an interference pattern," he told his AAAS audience.
Waller said he was even more intrigued when he considered the legends of ancient Britain. One legend suggests that Stonehenge was created when two pipers lured maidens into a circle with their magic tunes, and then turned them into standing stones. He noted that some of Stonehenge's monoliths are sometimes called "piper stones."
Steven Waller walks around two English flutes (recorders) to illustrate how the sound changes due to wave interference. He suggests that a similar effect might have guided the placement of stones at Stonehenge.
Could ancient acoustics have been behind some of these legends? To find out, Waller conducted an experiment in which he put blindfolds on experimental subjects and had them walk around an open field in a circle while two flutes played an identical tone (1100 Hz, or C-sharp). The sound waves from the two flutes interfered with each other in such a way that the sound alternated between loud and soft in different locations. When the walkers were asked to map out the area, they came up with a pattern of obstacles and archways much like an ancient stone circle.
"It's as if there was something blocking the sound ... a ring of invisible objects, massive objects, blocking the sound," he said.
Waller also analyzed the placements of stones at Stonehenge and other neolithic stone circles, and found the acoustic parallel he was looking for. "The pillars actually cast acoustic patterns that mirror an interference pattern," he said.
The leading hypothesis about Stonehenge is that it served as a religious center that was laid out to mark the astronomical alignments for Earth's seasons, and Waller doesn't take issue with that. "My theory doesn't necessarily conflict with the solar alignment theory," he said. But is there any evidence to show that Stonehenge's designers really did have acoustics in mind? Waller can only point to the circumstantial connections — for example, the fact that cave paintings were often put in the locations that had the best acoustics for ceremonies, or the fact that some ancient peoples thought echoes emanated from spirits inside stones.
"They didn't know about sound waves reflecting," he said.
Waller said the important thing is to be mindful of the contributions that acoustics can make to the study of sacred spaces. Some of those spaces are already in danger of disappearing. For example, Waller worried that some of the modern-day renovations aimed at making cave paintings in France more accessible to tourists may actually destroy the acoustic qualities that led the painters to those spots in the first place.
"Nobody has been paying attention to the sounds," he said. "We've been destroying the sounds."
More about the sounds of science:
- It turns out that cavemen loved to sing
- Was Stonehenge inspired by a sound illusion?
- Stonehenge: Totally awesome place for raves
- Researchers re-create scary pre-Columbian sounds
- Acoustic archaeology yields mind-tripping tricks
- Listen to the sounds of science
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.
Leave a Comment:
Yes, and the examples go on and on and on.
"Ancient peoples" were not idiots, they were just as mathmatically and scientifically educated as we are. Our great "discoveries" in science and math were old news to them.
So they must have known there's no God.
That would be my wager. While they didn't have computers or even the Renaissance mathematical ideals, these early folks certainly knew what they were doing.
I'm going to resist the obvious joke regarding the Quetzal clap and penicillin.
oops...too late.
Singing Cave Men? OMG, more racist GEICO commercials!
Dont you think this race thing getting a bit old?
That's where we are wrong - they were not caveman or they had help from extra terrestrials...
Alan Boyle .... another great and interesting piece ....
Although we have evidence of man creating instruments long ago of many types , modern man has surely become a master of the wave length and acoustics ....
Without question , natural occurring and deliberately constructed acoustic structures or places are interesting ....
But , I have to say that today , some of the masters of acoustics to me , would be .... Eric Johnson .... Steve Morse .... Joe Satriani .... Steve Vai .... Adrien Legg .... John Petrucci .... just to name a few ....
My favorite being Steve Morse .... a true master of masters ....
Thanks again Alan .... keep up the good work ....
Acoustic physics is fascinating, and as part of my ongoing project to determine how to create a hit record here in the sound isolation studio--which for reference is a room within a room within a room where the innermost room is fully floated on a layer of thick rubber mats made from ground truck tires--I did a bit of research on studio monitor systems and discovered that at the dawn of the early-21st century there are no commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) full-range studio monitor systems, so I devised an affordable studio monitor system which uses Kustom KPC15P 15" Powered PA Speakers and a Behringer DEQ2496 Ultra-Curve Pro Mastering Processor, along with a Behringer calibrating microphone and a Nady SPL Meter, where the Behringer unit does real-time analysis (RTA) and calibration of the loudspeaker units to make them full-range at equal loudness based on the normal range of human hearing (20-Hz to 20,000-Hz), with the key to the strategy being (a) that the Kustom KPC15P 15" Powered PA Speakers have big woofers and Class A/B power amplifiers and (b) that the secret is to keep the volume level of the Kustom KPC15P 15" Powered PA Speakers very low, since they are massively powerful and in fact are too powerful for small rooms, so by keeping the volume level very low this provides plenty of headroom both for the power amplifiers and the loudspeakers, which in turn makes it possible to boost the deep bass frequencies without damaging the woofers, all of which is documented in one of my ongoing topics in the IK Multimedia FORUM ("The Fabulous Affordable Studio Monitor System Project") . . .
http://www.ikmultimedia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=2290
However, the key bit of information is something that I suspected but had not really comprehended in any immediately conscious way, although I was getting close to realizing it, and it appeared as a bit of serendipity in a comment that another FORUM member made regarding the "Missing Fundamental" auditory illusion, which then led to doing a bit more studying and discovering that in January 2006 researchers at Heidelberg University in Germany proposed an hypothesis that there are two general types of listeners or "hearers" on this planet, specifically (a) fundamental tone hearers and (b) overtone hearers, where the high-level version of the hypothesis is that fundamental tone hearers are not fooled, tricked, or deluded by the "Missing Fundamental" auditory illusion, while in great contrast overtone hears are easily fooled, tricked, and deluded by the "Missing Fundamental" auditory illusion . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental
For demonstration purposes, the researchers at Heidelberg University created a simple auditory test comprising 12 pairs of tones, and this test is used to determine quickly whether one is a fundamental tone hearer or an overtone hearer, where the link to the audio test file and the key to interpreting the test results are found in the following topic at the Hydrogenaudio FORUM . . .
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t40690.html
As an example of the dismal realities of COTS studio monitor systems, when one is studying the technical specifications for these so-called "state-of-the-art studio monitor systems", one soon discovers that the frequency response or frequency range typically is from (a) 45-Hz to 100-Hz at the low end to (b) somewhere in the range of 18,000-Hz to 22,000-Hz at the high end, where the problem occurs in the low end, since among other things the fundamental frequency of the low-pitch "E" string of an electric bass guitar or string bass is 41.204-Hz, which tends to suggest that it will not be reproduced accurately at equal loudness in such studio monitor systems, as is the case with the deep bass of kick drums and so forth . . .
The deep bass is present in varying degrees, but the problem is that it is not present at equal loudness, which basically is the consequence of the way deep bass is perceived by the human hearing apparatus and the auditory perception regions of the human brain--primarily the auditory cortex but also the frontal eye fields (FEF) region--where for example to be at equal loudness with the more favored midrange frequencies, which are the frequencies to which the human hearing apparatus and human brain are most sensitive, deep bass notes need to be approximately 7 to 10 times louder, which according to the rules of basic physics requires the woofers to push a lot of air, which in turn maps to the woofers needing to be big and heavy, with this corresponding essentially to being vastly expensive to manufacture and to ship, so what happened over the past few decades is that loudspeaker and studio monitor system manufacturers simply stopped making full-range loudspeakers and studio monitor systems, based on what one only can guess is the idea that if they can fool enough customers, then nobody will complain, although the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has had an ongoing battle for over three decades with the various manufacturers regarding patently goofy and vastly misleading specifications, which continues to require the FTC to create new regulations to reduce the egregious sneaky weaseling or at least to make it a bit more obvious to naive consumers . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_cortex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_eye_fields
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher-Munson_curves
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_power#US
There is a lot more to acoustic physics and auditory perception than most folks imagine, and the more you learn about it, the more stuff begins to make sense, especially considering that many of the specific characteristics and behaviors of the human hearing apparatus and the auditory perception mechanisms of the human brain are designed primarily for survival reasons, which makes sense for example when you consider the Haas Effect, which is the name for the phenomenon where very closely arriving identical sounds are combined by the human brain and presented to the consciousness as being (a) one sound which is twice as loud rather than as (b) two distinct but not so loud sounds, which when you ponder this for a while--preferably after consuming either (a) huge quantities of very strong coffee or (b) magic mushrooms--has the curious consequence of making rapidly approaching paw and hoof sounds appear much louder, which one reasonably might suggest makes it possible to know precisely when to get out of the way or to do something to avoid being attacked by a tiger or whatever . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haas_effect
Whatever!
And for reference, in popular music, John Lennon used the Haas Effect in many of his Beatles songs (for example, "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"), as well as in his amazing hit song "Instant Karma! (We All Shine On), which is fabulous . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7F2X3rSSCU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEjUQ15lyzk
Fabulous! :-)
P. S. While in terms of modern technologies one can suggest that people were less sophisticated thousands of years ago, but I think that their hearing probably was considerably keener than the hearing of most folks at the dawn of the early-21st century, which tends to suggest that they did things with sounds that we are only now beginning to comprehend, really . . .
Really!
This article, and the accompanying videos are fascinating.
I don't believe that modern science has really scratched the surface about how much the ancients knew about acoustics, as well as other areas that appear to be another type of "science" that was lost to human memory.
I was awestruck by the acoustics of an ancient amphitheater that I visited in the ruins of the ancient capitol of Macedonia, Heraclea Lyncestis, years ago. Although this is from a later period in history, it is still considered ancient.
I stood at the top in the back of this large theater and talked with friends with normal voices who were near the stage at the bottom, like we were next to each other. It was a totally amazing experience.
I believe that modern science refuses to give proper recognition to people who are traditionally considered primitive. Much is coming forward, now, that shows a superior knowledge that has been lost.
And, nobody can, yet, explain the eye-witness account of a Westerner in Tibet who saw Buddhist Monks use sound to lift heavy blocks of stone. Yet, the "modernists" who look for empirical answers for these phenomena turn their backs, insisting that it was nothing but a fraud.
Ya, they're a total fraud. God lifted up them blocks for 'em
Another great article by the only person on MSNBC's staff I thoroughly enjoy reading at all times!
Having been to Chichen Itza, which is an amazing location, I wish I would've known about some of this before I went. Such is life.
Many thanks, Observer! I've never been to Chichen Itza but now I'm anxious to do the quetzal clap...
If anyone is interested in learning more about the 'technical' side of how the ancients used sound to manipulate objects, check out "In Search of the Miraculous" by P.D. Ouspensky.
Reminds me a little of modern day Senators, Congressmen & Legislators, ... with their Quite Competant/Great feats of Levitation uno. WHY uno they "Lifted" the MONEY right outtaah yore pockets n' bank accounts almost by MAGIC, >>> orr levitation. Yessssirreeebillybobthornton says they wuz quikk lerners n' studied thaa stars 2.
we are circadean beings. our internal clocks reset every 24hours based of the melatonin phases of the pineal gland. our pineal glands contain calcite crystals. if you produce a very natural low hum tone in a "mmm" sound with your teeth together, you will produce a tone between 80hz and 200hz. boy/girl- young/old this always applies if you can hum. This frequency is called the "punch" in kick drums. You "feel" this frequency because it causes pressure. This tone generated in an echoed environment creates a natural in/out of phase effect as the human larynx fluctuates in pitch, if even by only a few cents. (btw: the in/out of phase wavelength drawn out resembles two snakes entertwining / the cadeceus). This naturally occurring pitch we all generate is the resonant key to the steady build up of pressure in the inner ear from the "punch" frequency, which releases a piezoelectric charge resulting in the alteration of the calcite crystal shapes in the pineal gland.
science is getting closer to understanding sound holds the key to the spiritual & uncharted regions of our brains.
cool.
btw:
don't be duped by this idose / isochronic tone generator nonsense. we are biological antannae, each with a specific freq on the dial, we've been built with our own tone generators that create this effect specifically for ourselves and no other - but then, this goes into alchemy, anthropology, architecture,...crazy stuff.
p.s.
My inner skeptic thinks that calling stonehenge an acoustic ceremonial device might be 'Pildown-esque' if you ask me. If you've ever seen the heritage foundations photographic history of stonehenge, you see it in the manner with which it was 'discovered'. that would be like walking up to part of a french horn, guitar, and drum and calling it a tuba. the open air / vs closed air temples would be more appropriate place to start with revealing it's acoustic intent, as the temples in africa such as the mumbahuru or "great mother" temple are meant to reveal a womb as viewed from above, there are other intents beside acoustics, and greater sciences - being employed.