Music Decoded From 600-Year-Old Carvings

RulerOf writes "Musicians recently unlocked a 600 year old mystery that had been encoded into the walls of the Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, the one featured in The Da Vinci Code. The song was carved into the walls of the chapel in the form of geometric shapes that a father-son team — both are musicians and the father is an ex-Royal Air Force code breaker — finally matched to so-called Chladni patterns (see the Wikipedia article on cymatics). The recovered melody was paired with traditional lyrics (translated into Latin) and recorded; the result can be heard in this video (also linked from the musicians' website). The video also gives a visual representation of how the engravings match up to the cymatic patterns." From the Reuters article: "'The music has been frozen in time by symbolism... [The carvings] are of such exquisite detail and so beautiful that we thought there must be a message here.' The two men matched each of the patterns on the carved cubes to a Chladni pitch, and were able finally to unlock the melody."

Comments

Re:Who owes who?

[grolschie]

that go against DMCA?

TFA says that the chapel is in Scotland. Geography lesson: Scotland != USA. The DMCA does not apply to the free world i.e. non-US countries such as Scotland.

Re:What about pottery?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mythbusters did this (and the X-Files Lazarus bowl episode before it). It was busted.

Re:What about pottery?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Archaeoacoustics?

Re:What about pottery?

[DuckWizard]

Yup. Since Grant, Torry and Keri couldn't do it in a few tries with a very scope-limited test and homemade reading equipment, that clearly means it could never ever happen.

Re:Obligatory RIAA slam

[buswolley]

Well at the end of the video you will notice that there is a copyright notice. So, apparently, this music is now locked up for another 600 years.

Something's wrong.

[E-Sabbath]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chladni
Chladni released his patterns in the mid 1700s. That's a lot more recently than 600 years ago.
I think these guys found patterns where they don't exist, or wrongly confused them. Especially when you consider they used mod a lot to lop things off.

Re:nonsense

[mrchaotica]

"All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us!" -- MPAA

Re:unlocked?

[xirad]

That hex code is the HD-DVD processing key everyone's trying to get to all points of the Internet.

See http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/01/19 35250

Re:unlocked?

[RobertLTux]

the sequence is the hex key to HDDVD decryption its the "master key" so if you are hacking together an HDDVD player you will need this key somewhere

Re:May be analog water encodings

[spoco2]

"I wonder if the carvers were transcribing the patterns that various pitches made in some kind of water-bearing vessel. " Did you even watch the video? After they demonstrate on modern equipment how sand sprinkled on a surface having sound passed through it at various pitches gives pretty patterns they then demonstrate it being done with a sort of magaphone/horn arrangement with a skin pulled over the horn. Someone sings/makes a sound in one end, the skin vibrates... viola we have the same patterns being made on sand sprinkled on the skin.

That's more likely as it's easily done with the human voice as compared with trying to get water to do it.

Re:magic number

[StikyPad]

You mean like this?

E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. Although the exact history is murky, among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS.

E-mail was quickly extended to become network e-mail, allowing users to pass messages between different computers. The messages could be transferred between users on different computers by at least 1966 (it is possible the SAGE system had something similar some time before). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#Origins_of_e-ma il

Kids these days...

It's not medieval sounding...

[ockegheim]

I've listened to and studied a lot of medieval, renaissance and modern music, and it sounds like what a modern film composer might write for certain bits of a medieval film. To get technical:

• The repeating three-note phrase uses begins with the note B over what is essentially an F chord. This didn't happen until about the 18th century.
• At the very start of the video when just the trio is singing the word resonare, the final syllable is set to a unprepared dominant 7th chord, which was first used in the early 17th century.
• Once the string pads enter it sounds more like Arvo Pärt than John Dunstaple.

-

Re:nonsense

[jd]

This is also the phenomena associated with tape recordings of ghosts (where people want to hear a voice), premonitions, etc. The human brain is geared specifically to spot patterns. It's probably an evolutionary survival trait - patterns are easier and quicker to spot than predators and other threats, so seeing patterns and forming associations may have kept early humans alive. It's also likely a factor in religion and magical beliefs.

Re:May be analog water encodings

[lawpoop]

Yes, I did watch the video. The technique they used to create the patterns was the developed by Ernst Chaldni, who drew "a bow over a piece of metal whose surface is lightly covered with sand". He published his technique in 1787. Singing bowls go back at least a thousand years in Asia. Wikipedia says that "Singing bowls from 10th-12th century are found in private collections". The Rosslyn chapel was built in the 15th century, before Chaldni's time.

That's more likely as it's easily done with the human voice as compared with trying to get water to do it. Provided they knew the trick. How many thousands of years have people played drums without any awareness of the various pattern different harmonies would create if you put sand on it and sang on it? Chaldni published his findings in 1787. That tells me that it wasn't common knowledge. If your person in Asia in the 10th century, without a wealth of material possessions, and you have bowls lying around, my guess it that they they are going to put water in it at some point. Then, Hey! What happens when it has water in it and we make it sing?

As far as how the creators of the Rosslyn chapel developed it, I don't think there's any evidence for any technique. They may have used a bow on a metal plate. They may have sung onto membranes. This water-vessel technique is another method. They may have used another. I don't think we know at this point, I was just brainstorming and providing more evidence.

Re:It's really not that difficult...

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction -- the only conspiracy theory book that "Illuminatus!" isn't better than is Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum". Maybe I'd put them at the same level.