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Music Media Science

Music Decoded From 600-Year-Old Carvings 243

Posted by kdawson from the rosslyn-motet dept.
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."
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Music Decoded From 600-Year-Old Carvings More

Music Decoded From 600-Year-Old Carvings

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  • magic number (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:58PM (#18948089)
    And translated into hex it reads: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
    • as a poster on the site pointed out:... why the "stave angel" should be using the treble clef, since 15th century music was usually written with C clefs.
      sort of like reading about email in the 1960s...

      • Re:magic number (Score:4, Informative)

        by StikyPad ( 445176 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @06:44PM (#18949305) Homepage
        You mean like this?

        E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. Although the exact history is murky, among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS.

        E-mail was quickly extended to become network e-mail, allowing users to pass messages between different computers. The messages could be transferred between users on different computers by at least 1966 (it is possible the SAGE system had something similar some time before). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#Origins_of_e-ma il [wikipedia.org]


        Kids these days...

        • Re:magic number (Score:5, Funny)

          by pilgrim23 ( 716938 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @07:13PM (#18949565)
          well actually... I first sent emails via a timeshare called RAX that ran on a OS/360 under MFT/HASP but I also used PROFS on VM and other such. But back then "email" was more a geek toy then communication. I will admit that "DMR1,'HEY HOW ABOUT LUNCH?',LOG-N,CON=Y did get me a date once. AND it was typed in on a 1052. The recipient was at a RJE line and had to type her answer on a punch card to send it back..

          Kids indeed, he said as he chucks a vacuum tube in the general direction :)

  • Whoa. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dragon By Proxy ( 1063904 ) <DragonByProxy@gma i l . com> on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:58PM (#18948091)
    I didn't think vinyl was that old.

  • It's really not that difficult... (Score:4, Funny)

    by lightspawn ( 155347 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:59PM (#18948109) Homepage
    When there's no killer albino on your tail.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by orielbean ( 936271 )
      I am so glad I completely avoided the movie, book, and other cultural phenomenons associated with the story. THe more I hear, the less I want to be a part of it. :-P

      In other news, the Illuminatus! Trilogy is 100 million times better than any conspiracy theory book out there. RIP Bob Wilson.

  • Obligatory RIAA slam (Score:5, Funny)

    by hal9000(jr) ( 316943 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:59PM (#18948111)
    Can't wait for the RIAA to try to collect royalties on that!

  • 600 years? (Score:5, Funny)

    by markbt73 ( 1032962 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:59PM (#18948127)
    So the song enters the public domain in what, another decade or so?

  • DRMed (Score:2, Funny)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 )
    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

    • Re:DRMed (Score:4, Funny)

      by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:10PM (#18948291)
      > 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

      I just saw something interesting on a thread on That Other Site...

      Y'know what you get when you cross DRM with Ted Stevens with Gene Ray with Rosslyn Chapel? It's a series of cubes [imageshack.us]!

  • DMCA (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:03PM (#18948187)
    RIAA: Circumventing this encryption is a DMCA violation!

  • May be analog water encodings (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:06PM (#18948225) Homepage Journal
    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 .

    • Re:May be analog water encodings (Score:5, Informative)

      by spoco2 ( 322835 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @06:33PM (#18949197)

      "I wonder if the carvers were transcribing the patterns that various pitches made in some kind of water-bearing vessel. "
      Did you even watch the video? After they demonstrate on modern equipment how sand sprinkled on a surface having sound passed through it at various pitches gives pretty patterns they then demonstrate it being done with a sort of magaphone/horn arrangement with a skin pulled over the horn. Someone sings/makes a sound in one end, the skin vibrates... viola we have the same patterns being made on sand sprinkled on the skin.

      That's more likely as it's easily done with the human voice as compared with trying to get water to do it.

      • Re:May be analog water encodings (Score:4, Informative)

        by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @09:48PM (#18950747) Homepage Journal
        Yes, I did watch the video. The technique they used to create the patterns was the developed by Ernst Chaldni, who drew "a bow over a piece of metal whose surface is lightly covered with sand". He published his technique in 1787. Singing bowls [wikipedia.org] go back at least a thousand years in Asia. Wikipedia says that "Singing bowls from 10th-12th century are found in private collections". The Rosslyn chapel was built in the 15th century, before Chaldni's time.

        That's more likely as it's easily done with the human voice as compared with trying to get water to do it.
        Provided they knew the trick. How many thousands of years have people played drums without any awareness of the various pattern different harmonies would create if you put sand on it and sang on it? Chaldni published his findings in 1787. That tells me that it wasn't common knowledge. If your person in Asia in the 10th century, without a wealth of material possessions, and you have bowls lying around, my guess it that they they are going to put water in it at some point. Then, Hey! What happens when it has water in it and we make it sing?

        As far as how the creators of the Rosslyn chapel developed it, I don't think there's any evidence for any technique. They may have used a bow on a metal plate. They may have sung onto membranes. This water-vessel technique is another method. They may have used another. I don't think we know at this point, I was just brainstorming and providing more evidence.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dave420 ( 699308 )
        Plus when you stop, the sand doesn't instantly spread evenly across the surface, so transcribing the pattern to a carving is far, far easier than doing the same from a water-based method.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ZDRuX ( 1010435 ) *
      Sounds like something similiar to the way cornstarch behaves when shakes at a few G's of force. You can view the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=CH6-2UizHfI&sea rch=science [youtube.com] Very interesting stuff.

  • Fascinating... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by charleste ( 537078 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:07PM (#18948237)
    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.
  • DRM fails! ;)

    • Re:once again (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Cowpat ( 788193 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:33PM (#18948545) Journal
      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'.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by geekoid ( 135745 )
        600 years still isnt forever. I do note that this discovery came atr the time of the internet. When those notes can be effectivly 'shared'

        It must have been the storage facility for the fist music pirate.

  • nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:09PM (#18948283)
    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.


    • Re:nonsense (Score:5, Funny)

      by Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:17PM (#18948379) Journal
      You're right! I been seeing this 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 number sequence everywhere lately! I was freaking out. Thank you for giving me my sanity back

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by jd ( 1658 )
      This is also the phenomena associated with tape recordings of ghosts (where people want to hear a voice), premonitions, etc. The human brain is geared specifically to spot patterns. It's probably an evolutionary survival trait - patterns are easier and quicker to spot than predators and other threats, so seeing patterns and forming associations may have kept early humans alive. It's also likely a factor in religion and magical beliefs.
  • 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 lik
    • Nope, the noise from cutting tool was too high then.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Mythbusters did this (and the X-Files Lazarus bowl episode before it). It was busted.

      • Re:What about pottery? (Score:5, Informative)

        by DuckWizard ( 744428 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:32PM (#18948527) Homepage
        Yup. Since Grant, Torry and Keri couldn't do it in a few tries with a very scope-limited test and homemade reading equipment, that clearly means it could never ever happen.
        • Probably not unintentionally, which was the premise of the myth. They also tried taking it to a professional. The problem was with the "encoding" as it were, and not with the playback. The clay just didn't carry precise enough information.

    • Re:What about pottery? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:21PM (#18948427)
      You mean Archaeoacoustics [wikipedia.org]?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Bonker ( 243350 )
      Wow, that's a great idea, but it sounds like your particular example has a flaw. The carving tool's vibrations would be damped a lot simply by being held in a fleshy hand.

      There's got to be some other examples of standing waves being frozen in prehistoric media, however.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      After 10k+ years of aging? I seriously doubt it. Try doing it today. Make a normal clay pot (without deliberately carving a spiral audio track) and if you succeed in retrieving the sound of yourself reciting Shakespeare, go nuts.
  • I mean, c'mon, that DRM lasted 600 years! They're still trying to puzzle something together that's not broken in 600 minutes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Goaway ( 82658 )
      Thank you for making the twenty-seventh RIAA/DRM joke in this thread. We truly appreciate you taking the time out of your busy day to do this.

  • Terrorists. (Score:5, Funny)

    by DysenteryInTheRanks ( 902824 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:25PM (#18948461) Homepage
    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?

  • This reminds me... (Score:3, Funny)

    by rackhamh ( 217889 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:28PM (#18948485)
    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.

  • The recovered melody was paired with traditional lyrics (translated into Latin) and recorded;
    I doubt that the resulting pair of lyrics with music was necessarily correct. Even going by cadence if you had them in their original language you can't be certain. After all, you can sing the lyrics of Nine Inch Nails' "Mr. Self-Destruct" to the tune of Molly Hatchet's "Flirting With Disaster" (with a little verse juggling).

    • Re:Right lyrics? (Score:4, Funny)

      by just_another_sean ( 919159 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @06:27PM (#18949143) Journal

      After all, you can sing the lyrics of Nine Inch Nails' "Mr. Self-Destruct" to the tune of Molly Hatchet's "Flirting With Disaster"
      Can I get a copy?

    • Firstly, they don't claim that they're the right "lyrics", merely that they're from the right period.

      Secondly, the notion of "right lyrics" doesn't really apply because it's hardly unknown -- and hardly new -- for hymns to be sung to any tune that fits. It may not even have been metrical (as we think of it) at that time and place, so any words could have been matched to the tune at the choirmaster's whim. Anglican chant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglican_chant [wikipedia.org] is a bit too recent for the Rosslyn Chapel,

  • Something's wrong. (Score:3, Informative)

    by E-Sabbath ( 42104 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:54PM (#18948767)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chladni [wikipedia.org]
    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.
    • Sound has been making patterns in water and sand over tight thin material for much longer than 600 years. Just because Chladni was the first one to write them down doesn't mean other people had not noticed them.

      Watch the video.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Goaway ( 82658 )
        I did, and their patterns hardly match at all without squinting your eyes, tiliting your head, and believing really hard.
    • It's the sort of thing that can get noticed and forgotten about again, so I don't think the date that Chladni got his name attached to it is particularly significant. After all, it's hardly high tech.

  • Ugh! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jemenake ( 595948 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @06:24PM (#18949109)
    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. :)

    • 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
      Ok, but the statue figure holding the musical "scales" had his fingers on what appeared to be the exact notes that the cubes above him represented if they were cymatics. That makes it a little more convincing in my opinion, too many coincidences.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jd ( 1658 )
      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 kno
  • 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.

  • I call 'Bullshit' on this one (Score:5, Interesting)

    by goatpunch ( 668594 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @06:34PM (#18949217)
    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 $.

    • Re:I call 'Bullshit' on this one (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tkrotchko ( 124118 ) * on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @09:21PM (#18950499) Homepage
      "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."

      That's true, but it doesn't matter since the relative spacing between the notes is the same. So the key moves up or down but the melody remains the same.

      I'm not trying to defend it, and if nothing else, it's fun to watch the patterns of the sand how complex the patterns became at different pitches. Does that equal music? It might. People weren't dumber 600 years ago... they just didn't have access to Wikipedia.

  • Error check? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by flyingfsck ( 986395 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @06:49PM (#18949367)
    How will anyone ever know whether the decoding is correct? Pretty much any medieval sounding 7 notes per octave, vaguely musical tune will work...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Goaway ( 82658 )
      Next you'll be asking for scientific verifiability in horoscopes.

    • It's not medieval sounding... (Score:5, Informative)

      by ockegheim ( 808089 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @07:57PM (#18949891)

      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 [wikipedia.org] than John Dunstaple [wikipedia.org].
      -
  • Even with all the bogus vocals added in the youtube video, this composition sucks in a major way. There's got to be something else to it. I'd hate to think these people mystified the world for 600 years with an encoded, slow version of a bad Evanescence flop. And dammit, I like classical!

    On a sidenote, the cymatics were very interesting, and I believe I never encountered them before, despite a physics/maths - heavy education. The wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] is sadly very brief, although the main point I guess is the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )
      music 600 years ago was....primitive.
      Its not classically the classical period.

      Music was often tones with word on it, but not in a way that flowed with the music.
      for example, motzard was what 1750 to 1790?
      we are talking 300+ years earlier.

  • It's very difficult for me to suspend my skepticism that the researchers applied the proper diligence into their studies when they didn't even notice the misspelling "Demonstation" in the title sequence of their video.

    There's a reason why errors like this are a hallmark of crackpot science.

    (Granted, the bugly Diablo/Planescape/DaVinciCode font they used makes it nearly impossible to parse anything written in it.)

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