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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."
if you look for patterns in any data you will find them, a quote from the movie PI illustrates this human trait
Sol Robeson: Hold on. You have to slow down. You're losing it. You have to take a breath. Listen to yourself. You're connecting a computer bug I had with a computer bug you might have had and some religious hogwash. You want to find the number 216 in the world, you will be able to find it everywhere. 216 steps from a mere street corner to your front door. 216 seconds you spend riding on the elevator. When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will filter everything else out and find that thing everywhere.
From what I saw in the video, there's not enough of a match between the Chladni patterns and the designs on the cubes to convince me that this is what the sculptors intended. If that's considered a match, then I'm seeing Chladni patterns burned into 1/3 of the pancakes that I make (with the other 2/3's being Elvis and the virgin Mary).
:)
However... I do find the concept very intriguing. I'm sure that the patterns are produced by pitches that are of fixed ratios to each other. This means that you could reproduce the melody without knowing anything about the musical system that the authors used (the only requirement being that they came from the same universe as you... or, at least, one with the same physical laws governing wave reflection and interference). This aspect (ie, zero cultural knowledge) of it reminds me of the part in Contact, where the aliens send us prime numbers.
I also find it slightly plausible that the people would have known about this 600 years ago. If it's true that gregorian chants arose out of a desire to capitalize on resonances in houses of worship, then they would have had many opportunities to observe the effects of loud mono-tonal sounds upon visible things like, say, the bowl of holy water.
So... it's remotely plausible. But I think it's bullshit, anyway.