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: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: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.

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.

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