Sonic Illusions

your holes and hopefully it's pleasant. But we wanted to talk about sound more as an aspect of art and spirituality and and and even a sound escape that exists within nature and the ways in which humans have um interacted with us. Yeah, it's a it's a fascinating topic and a lot of it really just gets down to the heart of how do we interact with our world? Uh, what is our sense experience of the world, and what is our our our listening ex into the world. How

do we take in the soundscape around us? How do we deal with artificial soundscapes. We live in a world of just over overpowering access to soundscapes. You can go online and you can find just about anything in the natural or unnatural world to listen to and stream it right into your head. Well, and then there's just environmental sounds around us, um and you had mentioned this earlier. We really take for granted the fact that we can

manipulate sound around us so easily. Oh yeah, And I mean any given structure, any kind of artificial creation that we've made, or any manipulation of a natural environment, and you know, we're adjusting the way that we hear the world. You grow some hedges, great, you've you've just recreated the sonic experience of your environment. You build a house, same thing, you build a cathedral, same thing. Yeah, these are more like analog examples of the sort of technology that we

have at our disposal today. But what if you were ancient man, ancient human in back in the day and you had only the your surroundings to really play with sound, and you have some instruments, okay, but you had your hands to clap with, and you had things to bounce that sound off of. And that's where something like caves

become incredibly interesting. Yes, yeah, I mean especially and we were just talking about how the environment outside of our office space is essentially an artificial canyon, and then there's an artificial river of roaring traffic and all of this this stuff, and it's it's just easy to to to take all of it for granted, and just to to

overlook the manipulation of sound that's going on. Yeah, but imagine yourself in a time where you have just this this natural landscape and the soundscape that exists on top of it, and then you encounter this cave. What happens when you encounter this cave, assuming nothing jumps out of it and eats you. I mean, just the censory of experience of a cave is overwhelming. I mean, we I feel like today we will realize that in terms of our site, in terms of of the the tightness of

the space. I mean, it's still the stuff of horror movie and uh yeah, but but but just think about it also from the point of view of sound. Now, this is something that really arrested the imagination of Esther ingle Arcle writing for I oh nine, And she talks about the novel A Passage to India by Ian Forster.

And in this novel there's something called the Malabar Caves, and she says they're deep, and they're complicated, and any noise made inside of them, from the scrape of a match to the squeak of a boot heel, comes back as thunderous noise, the sound of the caves drive two British women temporarily mad. And this, this whole idea really

captured her imagination. And so she says, to her internal disappointment, Um, these caves, which are based on the b of our caves, do not have the power to drive people into altered states of mind with sound. But she says, hey does turn out that there are actually some caves around the world that do. And before you think, oh, well, that's just some sort of crazy fictional creation, though I mean

it did serve a literary point. She points us out in her article that uh, it's it's really about the the the coming revolution in India, the gap between the understanding of uh, the Indians and the British. So it's it works. It's not just the forester making stuff up and putting it in the book. No, it's a nice narrative technique to talk about the unknown. But but then if you actually set off to find that cave, you

would be somewhe disappoint You would be very disappointed. But if you are an archo acoustic researcher, you probably would know of several caves. But in order to get to those caves, we have to talk about what archo acoustics is in the first place. Yes, on a very simple level, this is just the study of sound in an archaeological context.

Um is simple as is, here's an archaeological site. We put a lot of effort into what does it look like, what did it look like back in the day, reconstructing it, reading any signs and symbols on it, and figuring out what what things were meant to symbolize. But then when you get into archaeo acoustics, it's also how did this place sound? What was the sound experience of this space?

And when you start talking about the sound experience of of of a space, I realized that can sound a little bit new ag and hippie dippy, And just try and eject that from your mind as much as possible, because, again, just to bore it down, the sound experience of a space is vital. Sound is an important sensory experience and I think it's it's obvious that it would be if if not the primary driving factor in the creation of of of these ancient sites. It certainly is a factor

in the experience of those sites. Yeah, so it definitely is a relationship of the sensory world and the human and that monument or that natural um area in which the person is sitting in. But they also measure the acoustic parameters of a place by use of electronic instrumentations, So they are trying to figure out the physics of sound here and how it's playing out. Now, some would take issue with the field of argo acoustics. Yeah, I mean, when you really get down to it, there's not a

lot of science to back it up. A lot of this and not to say there there have there have not been studies and they're there are not some some fascinating findings, and we'll get into some of that, but at heart, a lot of it breaks down to us trying to put ourselves in the mindset and in the

sense experience of increasingly early humans. Um. And when we're also when we're talking about the sounds that an environment makes, that an official environment makes, or even an augmented one such as a decorated cave, we're talking about percussion, We're talking about the ringing of rocks, We're talking about echoes, and we're even talking about wind water and heat expansion sounds. Uh, any kind of sounds that consider a part of that environment.

But yeah, as I believe us researcher Stephen Waller points out, um, and he's one of the primary researchers we're gonna talk about here. UM, A lot of this is about considering the physiological and mental effects of sound and how we use and have used, and continue to use ritual to generate altered mind states and aids visuary experience. And again, today we have access to all of these soundscapes, artificial

and uh and natural. We have all you know, you can put in any kind of ambient or high energy album to to augment your headspace, but in earlier times that wasn't an option. Yeah, and I think the main issue with our cho acoustics is again, uh, the interpretations. So yeah, you can hear various soundscapes in nature in a cave, for instance, and there may be some symbolism to accompany it. But I think that the um that the thing that's being levied against arco acoustics is that

we are tern recognition machines. So just because we see a correlation here doesn't necessarily mean that there is a causation. In other words, that people were um manipulating sound intentionally in these spaces for ceremonial purposes. For instance, now esther Angle Arcis writes, although the idea is not proved or even provable, I do like it. It indicates there is a gulf between two mindsets, not separated by geographical distance,

but by time. Two people standing in the same spot and experiencing the same phenomenon will perceive them completely differently. For one person the experience is a hallucinatory moment bringing together sound, vision, and religion, while the other will just see some pictures without taking note of anything else. Yeah,

that that's well put. And it it reminds me of Jerusalem Syndrome a bit which we've we've discussed in our Standall Syndrome episode about the impact of art and and also historical sites on the person and so much it is subjective what information you're bringing into it, with your own personal history, your mythological or religious interpretation of the world, um and and certainly a lot of that is is at play here. Yeah, And so it kind of boils

down to this. In archao acoustics, it could very well be that there just happened to be a soundscape that worked really well with symbolism. In ceremony, or it could be that, uh, the culture at that time really was trying to manipulate those areas and have it work with their mindsets of how the world worked. So we're never going to get to a definitive answer here. It definitely

is that the chicken or the egg argument. Yeah, and I can see where it's a hard sell for someone to to to at least interpret some of this, uh, this effort as oh, well, they're saying that Stonehenge or um you know, or or or this cave or that cave exists primarily as an historic site because it changed the way people heard sounds. Um. I can see where that would be difficult. I would be like saying, well, stone Hinge exists because people like the way it tasted.

You know, it's it. We're so we have such a visual mindset anyway. But but when you create a what is it ultimately a sacred site? I feel like any way that that site augments your sensory experience would be important to the people who made it and important to study as well. Yeah. Yeah, And and again artificial buildings, uh, artificial constructions, they change the environment. They change the micro environment.

As we've discussed in the previous podcasts, but also just as in terms of sound, you walk into a cathedral, you walk into a um, into into a Greek amphitheater, Uh, the sound changes. Your sound experience of this space is different than it would be had at an unaugmented portion

of the Earth. Well, and one thing too that I didn't mention is that one of the criticisms love it against archaeo acoustics is this bias that early humans were not sophisticated enough to really understand that so sound sound could be manipulated. So you could say, oh, yes, in a Greek amphitheater, that's totally intentional, right, that someone might take issue with it in a cave, Yeah, so that's

something to consider. Yeah, but but but then it also kind of comes down to someone saying, well, early man couldn't possibly appreciate the fact that the cave is changing the way it sounds come out like that's that's ludicrous. So so you know they're like, there're two sides. Indeed, all right, let's take a quick break and when we get back, we're going to talk about spread Pallory. All right,

we're back and we're headed to China. Yes, an ancient Mayan sight with a ball court, which sounds really sporty of them. Right. You sound like you're you're showing real estate right now. I know, and I feel like it's property too. And look, this is wellcore where there were

their wide outfits and play tennis. But in fact that is not at all with this ball court was about No, no, this uh, this whole site thousand years old and u uh you have a quarter of this as you have the pyramid, the kind of ziggarati ish Mayan pyramid that I'll try to include a picture of this with the landing page for this episode because you really have to look at it to get into everything that we're talking

about here. But uh, you have this pyramid, you have this ball court, and indeed they're not playing basketball here. This is a life and death game that is that

is occurring. Yeah, just let's foreground this and the fact that the Mayans were really big on sacrifice, and we think of sacrifice as this terrible cultural thing, but if you happen to live um during that time in the mind culture, then it would be um, you would have very high statue if you were someone who were who was going to be sacrificed, your family would be held in high esteem. So the culture was revolved around this idea.

And so you have a ball court, which sounds like a sporty thing, but in fact it's this this field where the drama of life is being played out. And it was first excavated in nineteen twenty by archaeologist Sylvani's Morley. Um it's five hundred and forty one ft long and two hundred and forty feet wide, and it is the largest in Mesoamerica, with walls on two sides and small temples at either end. And I also, I just want to throw in that if anyone say, looking at this,

you knowit brutal sport, it's uh. I mean ultimately all sports are just mock wars anyway, and maybe this is just a little more honest sport. Yeah. The idea behind this that I've seen is that, um, again, it's a life and death game that was played in the person who won, who actually offered his head to be executed. Again, this is because uh, in this mindset, you know, it

would be a great honor to to sacrifice yourself. So UM, keep that in mind, because I want to go back to the structure of this, the temples actually formed a whispering gallery. The amplified sounds spoken within them, and you can stand in this temple or by the temple side. Again, you've got two walls on either side and then temples on either side, and you can speak in a low voice and you can be heard distinctly at the end

of the court five hundred feet away. And the idea, at least according to David Loveman, who is one of the researchers probing the acoustic properties of ancient sites, is that um, the minds could create other sounds, not just whispering. They could do a whooping bird flying from right to left, and he said that the priests could also make sounds

that sounded like fierce animals like rattlesnakes and jaguars. Again, this is spectacle, this is life and death, and it would make sense that these whispering galleries would help to sort of ratchet up the suspense. Yeah, and it's also worth noting here just to really get down to what the minds were doing with their buildings and how they were manipulating perception. The pyramid temple um with its again,

with its step like sides. If you're viewing this um and you're in you're viewing it in the starting in the spring equinox uh time, when the day and night are at equal lengths. You'll you can see a shadow glide down the temple steps and over several days transform into different shapes as it moves across the courtyard. And most scholars believe that this, uh, this shadow represents the

feathered Mayan god called Culkin. So if they're manipulating shadow and light, I don't think it's any great stretch to imagine the manipulating sound as well. Yeah. And the fact of the matter is too, is that this is all sort of one big ceremonial celestial marker wrapped up in one, as you say, with sound with light, And it would make sense that this is probably one of the most important areas in which life is playing out in Mayan culture. Yeah, I mean, in a this is the center of their universe,

you know, it's the center of their culture. Uh. And they have all of their their mythology wrapped up in it and around it. So yeah, Now you can find whispering galleries throughout the world. Grand Central Station in New York is one an unintentional one. I believe, you know, the arches help to create this sonic illusion. You can whisper in one area and be heard another. Um, let me see the Saint Paul's Cathedral in London and the

statuary hall in the US Capitol Building. And apparently when I was doing this research, this is a sort of a unique way for someone to propose marriage. Yeah, there you go, using the sacred aspects of the site. However unintentional too, to take part of a sacred ritual. Yeah, it's kind of, you know, a romantic notion to know that you're you're ask for marriage. I suppose is traveling along in this very intimate way cross base in times

who beloved's ear? All right, Now we're gonna travel to uh, far different structure, sure, in fact, a natural structure, and that's the Liscow Caves. Uh. And these are of course located in France. You'll recognize the pictures, uh, ancient ancient illustrations of animals on the wall. Uh, you know, very

stereotypical cave paintings. Um. So really a John back in time, far beyond the mirror a thousand years ago of the mine example we were discussing, Yeah, Warner Harzog actually documented them in his film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and in it you see herds of rocks, bulls, and horses depicted running along the walls. There's a sense of motion, and

that is important in terms of archaeo acoustics. Stephen Waller of the research lab Rock Art Acoustics believes that the echoes of ritual clapping outside the cave would have sounded like hundreds of hoofs drumming on the ground. Own go, yeah, He said that. He also points out that many different ancient ancient cultures attributed thunder in the sky to hoofed

thunder gods. So in that sense, it makes perfect sense that the reverberation within the caves would be interpreted as thunder and inspired paintings of those same different hoofed entities right there on the cave wall. Yeah. And what's really cool about this is that it enhances the experience. Now you're painting with sounds, right, You're not just depicting life, You're you're using the acoustics to really ramp up the experience, and especially if you're looking at it in a ceremonial sense.

And we've talked about how the rhythmic clapping is really important in cultures. First of all, it's something that uh, that will coordinate the synapsis for everybody, right, so that's where the group inclusion thing to clap. The Second of all, it's something that is um intrinsic to ceremonies. So if you're trying to get everybody together and dance and song and to tell stories, then clapping is really important. Everyone's looping up signaps is firing at the same time, getting

in the same head zone. You know. In this I can't help but be reminded of contemporary artists and in a niche Kapoor, because all these you know, wonderful, often a large scale sculptures, but there's a mirror piece, a concave mirror at the High Museum or in Atlanta, and you stand before it and you move around in front of it, and of course the mirrors alter how you

appear and those around you appear. But it also plays with sound and you can you can have one person stand a little closer and a little person uh stand a little further back from it, and uh it alters the way you hear each other. So the idea of creating art and sound visual art and sonic art all wrapped up into one has been with us for a

long time, it would see. Yeah, especially if you consider symbolic thought, and uh this this was actually brought to light pretty recently that Homo sapiens are not the only one ones who are capable of symbolic thought, and researchers this year discovered as shell engraved with a geometric pattern at h erectus site known as Tranil on the Indonesian island of Java, and that dates to between five four hundred thirty thousand years ago. I bring this up because

it becomes an important aspect of how we order the world. Okay, we need symbols, symbols or the basis of language. So if you have cave art, if you have sound acoustics interplaying with that, then you also have this ability to kind of take hold of abstract thought and actually change behavior based on symbolism. And some would even argue that symbolic thought has ushered in morality or codes of living.

So that's why I think it's so important for all this stuff to be considered as being wrapped up as sort of one thing and not necessarily teased out as its own. Yeah. Yeah, there's nothing ancient Aliens about this idea.

I mean it gets right down to the heart of what humans are and what has allowed humans and considerably could have allowed Neanderthal or Homorectus to ascend to the heights that they have indeed, which would bring us to Stonehenge, because there couldn't be, you know, anything more enigmatic wrapped up in a mystery and then pierced with a tiny plastic sword of confusion. Yeah, I think Stonehenge is that what we did in our two episodes. Did we pierce

it with the tiny sort of confusion? So many swords of confusion? Yeah, And I think that speaks to how complex it is. Yeah. Yeah, I mean Stonehenge really resonates with everyone because it is this, this amazing site that clearly has a lot of thought involved in it, a lot of mental construction and symbolism, and we are often at pains to really understand what it meant from modern perspective.

A lot of great work has gone into it, and we have a lot of great, great answers now to what went into it at different phases, and some of the ideas out there do evolve around the way Stonehenge sounded as well as looked. Yeah, and um, as we had discussed before, this Stonehenge is something that has been

in the works for hundreds and hundreds of years. So think about all those people, all those generations adding to it, um, adding symbolic layers to it as well, and you get to the soundscape of it, and that becomes a very

interesting aspect of it as well. Waller in the October edition of Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and Waller at the time was acting as independent scholar, he details how the shape of Stonehenge mimics the patterns of positive and negative interference produced by two sources of sound, an auditory illusion that may have been imbued with something that's in like otherworldly significance by a culture that didn't necessarily understand the physics of the phenomenon, but sort of

understood that there was something happening. Yeah. He says that the Stonehenge might have worked as kind of a giant sound wave interference filter. And and the interference here occurs when when these we have two instruments that would would play at the sing at the same time the same note, each creates sound waves that have alternating high and low pressure segments, so when the high and low pressure segments collide,

they cancel each other out. Now, Waller asked blindfolded participants to do this, to basically move around in a circle with two pipers playing notes in the field. I wonder if this is expressed on the call out for study participants. Hey, we were doing a scientific study. We need you to walk around blindfolded in Stonehenge while people play pipes. I know it sounds like the plot for like this is final top part too, you know. Yeah, I'm thinking yeah,

that or or the wicker Man or something. It doesn't sound like it's going to end. Well, no it doesn't. But but they were asked to do this, and uh they they were the listeners who were taken through spaces where the sound is amplified space just where the sound waves collide out of phase and our muted so loud quiet, loud quiet, and so on and so on. So they did this, and he reported that, um, the same sort of auditory effect was happening here when he compared it

to Stonehenge and the piper stones. Um, and also what would have been in place, because remember Stonehenge right now is not complete. It's just sort of um a shell of itself. Indeed, Stonehenges that stands today is incomplete. So if you were if you're going to study the acoustics of stone Hinge, sometimes you have to actually work with fake stone hinges as well, as we'll see in the study of Dr Bruna Facinda of the University of Salford in the UK. UH. This guy like like Waller studying

the acoustics of Stonehenge. But since the original stone Hinge isn't complete, some of the stones are toppled uh and also didn't have access to electric generators that would be needed run the equipment. They turned to the World War One Memorial of Stonehenge replica in Maryhill Museum in Washington State here in the United States, which which is interesting to think of studying this this ancient location by by by using this as well as a World War One memorial. Um,

I'm glad they could use car Hinge. Journey of the other generations that would change. Yeah. And didn't they pop balloons? I believe I believe so. Yeah. Um, And the reason is because they couldn't bring in electricity, so they're trying to just do some some auditory noises that they could then determine the k rate of energy and figure out

the energy time curves at measured positions. Now, the studies conclusion is that Stonehenge was a reflective environment and which any sound is made to reverberate due to the flat heart services. So we're talking about a one second reverberation time. Yeah, and that would certainly be enough to be noticeable by anybody that's entering into the circle. Uh. And it's it's also an optimal reverberation time for large lecture halls, ensuring that a good speech is interpreted intelligibly by those in

the vicinity. Right. So you know, again we are not exactly certain how it was used, why it was used, but it's very obvious that there was that that time will apps and sound, and that the person entering that space might have experienced whatever it was, ceremonial or otherwise at an elevated level, an altered state, given all the other data and stimuli and meaning surrounding it. Indeed, um, now you pointed out the flat hard surfaces, and uh,

it takes me back. I believe it was was Waller who pointed out that at times they could actually find art in caves by clapping and hearing where the reverberations. Right, yeah, and so you end up getting into that sort of chicken and egg, right did they? Did they paint uh? This, uh? This, this horned beast on this on this hard flat surface because it's easier to paint things on a hard flat surface,

and it's kind of the standard. Or was it because of the reverberation the sonic residence of that particular spot. It's hard to say. Kurt Hopkins, writing for Arts Technical says, scientists, whether acoustic scientists or archaeologists, are for good reason reticent to draw conclusions that are not based on provable, duplicable facts. But at least we can do this picture. What's such a structure with such an acoustical profile would have meant

experientially to visitors? The human imagination values form the circular form of Stonehenge and the relationship of points therein must have been lent in otherworldly dynamic by the special character of its sound. Indeed, and again, I think so much of that is is so easy to overlook in our modern environment, where we're just surrounded by by environments that

are artificial and eight ultimately artificial sound experiences. And then you know every album or SoundCloud file that we've ever pumped into our head to augment our experience of reality or even to augment our experience of another artificial reality. I mean, that's how crazy our modern experiences. We're listening to artificial soundscapes while we plug our head into a book, or or playing or playing a video game, or maybe

we're watching a separate film. All of this is going on. Uh, it's easy to lose track of what artificial sound and artificial stimuli would have meant to early people. Well, and I was even thinking about what it means to us now and how important it is. And we plumed this a little bit in our episode on time and perception and music and how we can so easily alter it, and we try to do that. We try to alter our day to day experience and find some meaning it

through art through music. So it would make sense that if you were devoid of of the music that we know today, that this would become exponentially important in your world as an early human indeed now And in closing, we wanna, we wanna lead out here with a great example of almost modern archaeo acoustics, if that makes sense, kind of a modern take on some of these presumed ancient practices of utilizing the natural acoustic properties of caves.

I'm talking about the Great stalac pipe organ Um, and you'll find this in Larie Caverns of Virginia. This h what what we're talking about here is arguably the largest musical instrument in the world because instead of using pipes, this organ is wired to us little soft rubber mallets

that gently strikes stalagtites of varying lengths and thickness. So it looks like when when you look up a picture of this, it looks like something that the Phantom of the Opera or Vincent Prices is Dr fives would play because it's in a cave. And here's this this sort of old time like you know, nineteen fifties organ um. You play the keys, little mount strike the stalactites, but to achieve the kind of precise musical scale you need to actually play the organ. The chosen stalactites, uh cover

a range of over three point five acres. But since you're in this enclosed cave environment, you can hear the music throughout. Yeah, this organ was invented and built in nineteen fifty four by Leland Sprinkle, a mathematician and electronics scientists,

and it took him over three years to complete it. Uh, we're talking about looking at each of these stalactites and trying to figure out their thickness and how much they're going to conduct sound, and then wiring up over five miles of these chosen stalactites to create this network for the organ. It's crazy. I mean, i'm, i'm. In recent years, I've i've I've gotten big on the idea that you know, caven vironments are special and we shouldn't mess with them

too much. But if you're going to mess with the game environment, I guess turn it into an amazing pipe organ. Um Sprinkle And this was interesting too. I was reading this, of all places, on DJ Foods blog, his far fabulous blog about music and comics and pop culture stuff, but he mentioned that Sprinkle got the idea for this after his son banged his head on a stalag type and it rung with a quote pleasant sound. I love it. I love people like Leland Sprinkle. He's like, and now

I can create the world's largest instrument underground US. Yeah, and it's uh appparently the used to you could buy vinyl records of music uh that that that was produced using this pipe organ. And in two thousand and eleven, the Finnish Swedish music collective Peppe de Lux actually became the first artist who write and record an original composition on the Great Stalac pipe organ. Uh. And you can find that out the name of the find that out there. The name of the album is a Queen of the

Wave and uh. And also you can just look up DJ Foods post about it. I believe he has an embedded SoundCloud. I'll be sure to link to that, as well as some other of the interesting articles we've discussed here in the landing page for this podcast episode. All Right, what do you guys think, um, when it comes to our chao acoustics? Is this just the old pattern recognition of the mind or is this intentional ritualized landscapes? Yeah? Or is it you know, is somewhere in between. We'd

love to hear from everybody. Uh. It's certainly an issue that that people seem to have strong opinions about. Um, where are you gonna find us? Well, you're gonna find us stuff to blow your mind dot com. That's our our website. That's our mother page. That's where you'll find all of our podcast episodes are blog post our videos, links out to our various social media accounts. And if you would like to send us a missive please do

we like to hear from you guys a lot? You can send us an email at blow the Mind at how staff works dot com. For more illness and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com