Prehistoric Culture | DISCOVER Magazine: When priests at the temple complex of Chavín de Huántar in central Peru sounded their conch-shell trumpets 2,500 years ago, tones magnified and echoed by stone surfaces seemed to come from everywhere, yet nowhere. The effect must have seemed otherworldly, but there was nothing mysterious about its production. According to archaeologists at Stanford University, the temple’s builders created galleries, ducts, and ventilation shafts to channel sound. In short, the temple’s designers may have been not only expert architects but also skilled acoustical engineers.
4 comments:
wow, ancestors are always amazing. i konw that they built a lot of great buildings and they knew a lot about heaven and the universe. but i never know that they were really good at unreachable physics. they dicovered it, learnt it and put it into practical and made ir work for them. no wonder they can conquered the nature and created so many civilazations and developed them into the highly modernized society we have now. They were smart and they kept thinking!
I personally love being in very echo-y and resonant spaces, and it's no wonder that ancient peoples sought out those places or created them. Back in my hometown, there was a "tunnel" of sorts through a hotel that went from the sidewalk on the main street in town to a sidewalk in the back parking lot of the hotel. There wasn't a door or closure on this tunnel, so every time you would walk past quickly on the main street while talking, there would be the split second where you passed the tunnel and you'd hear it echo back. My friends and I would sometimes play around with echos at that tunnel because it sounded so cool. That is exactly what ancient people did, except instead of finding a tunnel under a hotel building, they would walk around a canyon or cave. It's no wonder they painted their artwork and (possibly) held religious ceremonies there, the sound bouncing back is an entertaining thing to hear.
I am always amazed to find out how advanced ancient societies were. It's interesting to think that all of that knowledge was lost at some point throughout history, and that we are only now discovering it all. Things about physics, art, language, and music that we think are original ideas are all most likely things that were discovered hundreds of thousands of years ago that were forgotten. Is there really even original thought anymore?
Having prerecorded sound constantly at our fingertips has seriously skewed our generation’s perception of sound. Digital sound has become unremarkable background noise. In the acoustical age listening to music required conscious effort and focus; each side of an LP only runs for only a little over twenty minutes. But over the course of human history, recorded music is merely a blip right at the end. Imagine the impact of a live sound event if you had never encountered anything of the sort before, or encountered it only rarely. The type of acoustical engineering that this article says is found at Chavín de Huántar is remarkable today, but must have seemed like a divine phenomenon to ancient peoples. This is a fascinating study.
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