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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."
And translated into hex it reads: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I didn't think vinyl was that old.
When there's no killer albino on your tail.
Can't wait for the RIAA to try to collect royalties on that!
So the song enters the public domain in what, another decade or so?
"Oh boy! Are we going to try something dangerous?"
The mystery was unlocked after the following number has been applied to the code from the walls: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
You can't handle the truth.
RIAA: Circumventing this encryption is a DMCA violation!
The song is a physical component of the building. The public domain enters into the song. Sort of an acoustic Soviet Russia, if you will.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
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.
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.
So, if I understand correctly, they circumvented a special visual encryption scheme to unlock this music. Then they made an unauthorized copy, which they performed, recorded and then uploaded to the Internet.
Jack Valenti heard about the whole thing and had a heart attack.
These people are terrorists. Not only did they steal a copyright owned by Jesus himself, from a Church, they hate our precious freedoms to help corporations own and profit from music.
The are probably pirating gay abortion manuals as we speak to sell to Hezbollah and undermine our troops in Iraq. Can someone put these enemy combatants on a no fly list before the unthinkable happens?
It's only tangentially related, but TFA reminds me of a (supposedly true) story I once read about a man who found a plaque bearing the initials "H.W.H." The plaque was in such a prominent position that he assumed it must have been dedicated to a very important person in the town's history. He spent YEARS in the library, poring over records dating back into the 1800's, but wasn't able to find anything. Finally, out of desperation, he placed an ad in the newspaper, requesting assistance in identifying the mysterious "H.W.H." The very next day, he was called upon by a younger gentleman who kindly informed him that his father, in fact, had been one of the people who installed the underground hot water heater.
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.
Tell that to Canada,,,, serouisly.
rubbish. This security-through-obscurity method has taken 600 years to crack - plenty long enough for whoever encrypted it to not have to worry about the consequences. One in the eye for 'security experts'.
FGD 135
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.
That hex code is the HD-DVD processing key everyone's trying to get to all points of the Internet.
9 35250
See http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/01/1
Either that or they just failed to install the right Codecs
Cheers, Chris
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
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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.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
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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How will anyone ever know whether the decoding is correct? Pretty much any medieval sounding 7 notes per octave, vaguely musical tune will work...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
-I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
Is breaking this encoded mystery a volation of the DMCA?
Don't be so sure. There is, after all, oil in Scotland. It will fall under US jurisdiction soon enough.