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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."
A couple of weekends ago, I took a sound healing workshops with Steve Sklar in Minneapolis ( mod me down for attending a new age workshop ;) ).
We played around with singing bowls. These are bowls of a particular metal alloy, and when you fill them with water at various levels, you can see patterns in the water emerge when you get the bowls vibrating strongly. At various levels, you can even see five-pointed water patterns. If you get them really going, the vibrations are so strong that water sprays out of the strong points. Sometimes they formed 'halos' or round craters in the middle, like some of the carvings.( As far as healing, you put these suckers on your body at various points and they give you a great, penetrating massage. )
Looking at the patterns referenced in the videos, I wonder if the carvers were transcribing the patterns that various pitches made in some kind of water-bearing vessel. I think this goes back to Pythagoreans and their idea that the sacred geometries were related to musical tones. IIRC, they thought that the basic generational patterns of our world were geometric, and represented themselves in various ways, including musical scales and visual geometry .
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I personally found this fascinating, because it actually puts into pictures the common things we geeks learn in physics... about waves, destruction, amplification, et. Al... Worth the watch.
Wouldn't it be cool if this method could be used to decode sounds recorded tens of thousands of years ago? A caveman is sitting in a cave making some pottery, probably by running some kind of copper tool along it to make patterns on the pottery. As he's talking with other cavemen, the sound from their voices is making the copper tool vibrate along the pottery. Using lasers we can analyze the microscopic indentations caused by the tool and convert them into sound and hear what an ancient language sounded like. We could create recordings of ancient Greek, Proto-Indo-European, etc.
I remember a recent post about goemetric shapes in the galaxy, on a planet, etc. I wonder if somehow harmonics are causing this amazing anomoly is these places somehow.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Sorry to be a spoilsport, but this whole thing seems highly speculative.
The matching between the Cymatic patterns and the carvings is tenuous at best- is it just me, or does the Cymatic pattern at 2:54 in the video look _nothing_ like the carving it fades to? In addition, for this technique to have any validity, they would either have to know the plate size used by the composers or demonstrate that the Cymatics are unaffected by the size and thickness of the plate, which I doubt.
They also make the vast assumption that the angels are pointing to a treble clef, when there are many others such as the C clef and bass clef that were more common in the 15th Century.
Even if they decoded the tones correctly they give any explanation as to how they discovered the timing of the piece, or was this just 'to make it sound cool' like the random vocals that they added?
Sounds like someone had this at the back of their mind for 20-odd years and then they read the Da Vinci Code and saw a way to make a quick $.
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I have to say that the physical carvings did not match with the patterns being shown nearly so well as I'd expect if they were a genuine encoding. The stave thing is interesting (there's an apparent representation of a figure indicating a chord, which seems to be the same as the sound indicated by the cube above it). However, the human brain is excellent at only seeing patterns that match up with preconceived notions. Are there contra-indicators that were ignored? If you apply the same logic to patterns known not to be musical (such as geological formations), would you get an equally playable, convincing result? Until there is an effort to falsify the theory (not slam it, falsify it - there's a difference) then it is merely speculation, albeit very interesting speculation. And even if it were falsified, say by geological formations, it's always an opportunity to start a whole new form of, uhhh... rock music.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I can name that tune in three notes.
Loads of music archives record the key, title and lyrics, often only encoding the first chord or first three note progression of a tune instead of the entire melody.
I'll bet real cash that this is the same thing (if it's true) the first three notes are a key, and the archivist assumes the reader can guess the secret just by knowing the song.
Given that, I'll go out on a limb and say something sung on a daily basis by a certain group of people, either priests or congregation, possibly the holy chant (which hasn't been changed in a long long while) or sung by a secret organization as part of their ritual, perhaps masons or knights templar depending on the date of the carving and location.
Further, those standing sand waves can be reproduced by anyone. I have a rope tension snare drum, upon which I've dumped a handful of sand, and played my fife next to it, instant standing waves just like in the video.