Steve Heimel
is one of those people who makes you glad you were at the right place
at the right time to connect and find common interest. We were both at KPFT-FM
in Houston, so it's not unlikely we should both have interest in things of the ear -- what the ear can understand and what someone once called "Theater
of the Mind" as being a different and more complex and subtle form of
theater than that involving visual images, such as film or Television.
So, knowing my interest in the effects sound can have on people, whether
Bernie Krause's amazing recordings of animals in the context of their environments,* or Sufi concepts explaining the use of musical tones for
spiritual purpose, or even my own rudimentary experiments with with a
guitar and echoes at Rocky Creek Canyon in Big Sur, Steve alerted me in April of this year to the fact that Stanford University was awarding Miriam Kolar the first PhD in Acoustic Archaeology at Stanford for her work on Archaeological Acoustics at Chavín De Huántar
in the Peruvian Highlands. He sent me this article he had written which
explains the principles and research better than I could.
Imagining Our Own Past and the World Beyond
Steven J. Heimel, March 31, 2012
All the way back to the Greeks and before, European culture is
rooted in worship and theater. Now a budding field of archaeology brings
us new evidence of elements of theater in ceremonial locations going
back thousands of years in both Europe and the New World.
The stones of ancient outdoor plazas rang with strange sounds that
scientists are beginning to be able to reproduce. We are beginning to
learn what an oracle sounds like.
This year for the first time the American Association for the
Advancement of Science had a session on a promising new science called
archaeoacoustics, the study of the sounds of the past. This field offers
another means of exploring the endlessly fascinating subject of the
mental processes of humans of the past. It is difficult enough to
imagine the thinking of our own grandparents, let alone historical
figures of past centuries, yet we love the mysteries of the more distant
past. Something in us wants to imagine those ways of seeing the world,
or, in this case, hearing it.
In its debut before the wider scientific world, archaeoacoustics
offered a symposium with three speakers, one of whom will soon become
the first graduate student to earn a doctorate in this field, at the
same time that her first book will be published. It's not too hard to
imagine this book making a splash. Or some thunder.
A second speaker was an engineer who has been compulsively
investigating this field because he can't help himself. His presentation
verged on poetry, with his talk of a world beyond, evoked by sound. And
the third speaker was one of the founders of the field, a professional
acoustician who makes his living controlling
noise and designing and
tuning the acoustic properties of concert halls. David Lubman had the
clout to persuade his fellow scientists that archaeoacoustics was worth a
symposium. Science can help explore the sounds of the past.
All three panelists were at pains to point out that in an era of
machinery our soundscapes have changed. The sound of motors and
overflying aircraft corrodes the acoustical world and many of us rarely
experience real soundscapes that communicate the properties of a place
and its life. We are losing our feel for them. Maybe our interest can be
re-kindled through the power of the world beyond.
There is a ritual space in the Yucatan Chichen Itza site that is
called the ball court of the gods. How could it be anything else? It's
278 feet long with 28-foot-high walls on each side, far larger than the
customary Central American ball court. Acoustician David Lubman says
those parallel walls can create all sorts of interesting auditory
echoes,
and the Maya priests must have been adept at using these properties. He
is quite comfortable calling it theater, in a respectful way. In fact,
he initially made his presentation about it at a professional conference
last year on "The Acoustics of Ancient Theatres."
So what does an oracle sound like?
Stonehenge, says investigator Steven J Waller. He has discovered that
two pipers standing a few feet apart in a field, playing the same tone,
generate an interference pattern that to a blindfolded person walking
around them, sounds like stone pillars between them and the pipers. He
has literally mapped out this interference pattern and come up with a
map of the stone circle of Stonehenge. He has also generated
interference patterns that have nodes corresponding to the vast Avebury
circle, with its 98 stones. "With the tools of modern science, we know
it is an interference pattern explained by the reinforcement and
cancellation of waves of pressure in the air. But ancient peoples must
have taken it as something from a world beyond that of our normal
senses, maybe the realm of the gods."
Waller started down his path of soundscape exploration because he was
fascinated by petroglyphs. He was surprised at what can happen to sound
at petroglyph sites. Many of them have echoes, he says. "And when you
hear an echo from a stone wall, it sounds as if it is actually coming
from behind that wall." This led him to mythology about entities that
live inside the rocks, perhaps in caves with secret entrances, "a spirit
world on the other side of an echoing wall."
Waller's outdoors experiences also got him thinking about the raw
power of some of the sounds of nature, and how people might think of
them, too, as manifesting forces of a spirit realm. Thunder and
lightning, for instance, which he links to iconography found in many
petroglyphs. Or the sound of large hooved animals stampeding. At this
point, Waller pointed to the abundance of cave art portraying animals
with hoofs. And a great many axes.
Drumming, he added, is also
portrayed.Then there is the omnipresent Kokopelli and his flute, akin to
the piper in the field. Aware of his scientific audience, Waller seemed
to be holding himself back from rhapsodizing at length on these
themes.People found it spellbinding nonetheless, and he was surrounded
by a crowd eager for more when the symposium ended
The composer R. Murray Schafer has been writing about soundscapes
for years. He's the one who coined the word. Like the
archaeoacousticians, Schafer laments the various forms of sound
pollution that deaden our senses to the auditory world around us.
Schafer writes of how puny the sounds of natural forces can make us
feel. In terms of raw power, unassisted humans can come nowhere near
generating the decibel level of a clap of thunder. But Schafer points
out that as we formed our guilds of masons and learned to build
cathedrals, we acquired the power to bring the thunder into our ritual
spaces by inventing the pipe organ. And now, he adds, with the amplified
guitar in the rock and roll arena.
It was not an archaeologist but a tour guide who first spotted a dragon
of light descending the steps of the Kukulkan pyramid at Chichen Itza at
the spring equinox. The occasion has since become a destination for new
agers, who have taken to clapping their hands rhythmically as the light
arrives along the edge of the staircase. In
1998, David Lubman
analyzed the way the sound of a handclap is reflected by the staircase.
The echo of a handclap in front of the dragon staircase is the call of
the quetzal bird. And you could clearly see it in the sonograms he
provided, and hear it in the recordings he played. Like Steven Waller,
Lubman turns to mythology for an explanation, noting the importance of
the quetzal as a messenger of the gods.
And he, too, could rhapsodize. "But you have to see the mating flight of
the male quetzal! He comes at ferocious speed straight down from very
high, his long feathers trailing behind him in waves.The colors! You can
literally see the maize fall from the heavens, its head breaking off,
revealing the grain." It's beyond imagining. To feel the power, you
would have to be there, clapping with the new agers and hearing the echo
coming back as the call of the messenger bird from inside the
pyramid.It gets better. At either end of the Chichen Itza ball court is a
temple.
A person speaking in one of those temples can be heard by a person in
the other, 540 feet away, and can also be heard by a person in the ball
court, as a "disembodied voice." Lubman says we can only imagine how
much stronger the effect was with the smoother frescoed surface the
walls would have had thousands of years ago.
Miriam Kolar of Stanford University gave the symposium an
action-packed tour of her world of the last few years, which is located
high in the Andes in Peru. It is an apparent ceremonial location at 3178
meters called Chavin de Huantar. It is about three thousand years old,
and abundant among its depictions are predatory cats from lower
elevations and psychoactive plants. This temple is the basis of her PHD
work and it could be that with the possible exception of locals, no one
living knows this temple better than Miriam Kolar. And she does not
hesitate to use locals and a great many coinvestigators in her
exploration of how this ancient world might have sounded.
Depictions by these pre-Inca people on the path of a massive labyrinth
of waterworks used to reach the location often include faces with
upturned eyes and mucus trailing from the nose. The picture is of
disorientation, at length reaching the temple to reveal an open plaza
with seating, a set of stairs and passages leading to an inner chamber.
Kolar
depicts the mission of her new field of science as to seek
"contextualized material evidence from the human past, in order to
understand ancient life...to study how sound could have been important
to ancient peoples and places." It was sensible for her to go to locals
for an understanding of what she found in the inner chamber - three
thousand year old conch shells, modified for producing sounds. If this
were a rock concert arena, the inner chamber would be the sound booth.
But in this case the instruments were not on the stage but inside the
sound booth.
What are we to make of this? David Lubman might speculate about a
priestly class seeking to mystify the crowds. But Incas were not Maya,
and Andes pre-Incas were even more removed from that bloodthirsty
civilization on the Yucatan. We might have something very different
here, and we'll have to wait for her book to find out what Miriam Kolar
speculates.She told the symposium that the sound of the labyrinth was
fascinating, with its tumbling waters, and its climbs in shaped channels
between walls, but for the most part her measurements have dealt with
the plaza and its relationship with the chamber.
There are three tunnels built between them, the central one of which
is obvious from the amphitheater. The other two flanking it have
openings that are more concealed as part of the staircases. She went to
traditional players of conch shells, called patutus, to find out what
sorts of sounds they could evoke from the instruments, and they all
traveled to the site to experiment and measure. People listening in the
plaza described the subjective effect of hearing patutus played in the
chamber as "disorienting." The players explored a number of effects, and
it was fairly easy for them to evoke the roars of big jungle cats,
among many other sounds.
The measurements this collaborative crew took at Chavin de Huantar
were exhaustive, and, as might be expected of a presentation to an
audience of scientists, were displayed in great detail. In essence, what
they show is that the comparison of the inner chamber to the sound
booth of a rock arena is apt. The mixing board used by a sound crew
always has equalizers, tuners that can amplify or diminish selected
frequencies. Kolar has found that the architecture of the passages
between the chamber do the same thing. "They perform, in effect, as
equalizers, an architectural acoustic filter system that favors sound
frequencies of the Chavin patutus and human voice."
Tanatalizingly, she goes on to say they "conducted psychoacoustic
experiments" that suggest the creators of the site built Chavin in part
"for acoustic effect, appropriate to a probable oracle center." So, the
investigators speculate, these ancients were seeking to get the world
beyond to speak. And it goes way back. Lubman points to
the Chauvet Cave's four-second dwell time for the echo of the sound of a drop of water.
Maybe we have to experience the effects to get beyond the
simplistic. Maybe we have to climb through the labyrinth. Maybe in order
to feel what would have driven people to move those enormous stones we
have to carry a certain desire through the labyrinth or along the
ancient ley lines that stretch between ancient megaliths. Or maybe we
need to start taking some measurements in our rock arenas. Perhaps there
are other modern remnants of ancient practices. I think of the totem
poles and spirit houses of the Gitxan people of the Skeena River,
reflecting an established high civilization that stretches more than a
thousand miles along the coast.
Looking at ancient monuments it is easy enough to imagine a priestly
class of some primitive society resorting to theatrical tricks in a
quest for power, but it violates the law of parsimony - these monuments
represent a far greater investment than necessary. Any mechanic of power
will tell you it takes a lot less than this to bamboozle the people.
But if we consider the way the stones were laid out in astronomical as
well as acoustical alignments, perhaps we get a clue.
There has been much speculation about the ancient shell middens of
Pinnacle Cave, a site near the tip of Africa where occupation by
creatures something like humans goes back a million years or more. As
the world glaciated, the tide pools would have retreated farther and
farther away, and some evolutionary theorists speculate that a knowledge
of the relationship between the stars and the tides might have
developed as these beings sought to keep
making the trip to get the
shellfish with their rich omega 3's to fuel the evolutionary investment
of their brains. Add to that mix the various forms that language would
have taken, such as gesture, and it is not all that hard to imagine the
roots of theater going back to Pinnacle Cave and the beginnings of what
it is to be human.
*****************
* I heartily recommend Bernie Krause's book:
The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places -- wonderful stories of things he's seen and done in places none of us will ever get to see and be.
See also:
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/groups/chavin/team.html
Chavín de Huántar Temple
Chavin de Huantar
Steve Heimel
