Listen to the ancient sounds of Stonehenge: app transports you back to 3,000BC
Listen to the ancient sounds of Stonehenge: app transports you back to 3,000BC
Digital acoustic models were used to reimagine what it would be like to walk around Stonehenge and listen to the sounds of music and wildlife in 3,000BC
By LIAT CLARK
Wednesday 12 April 2017
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The secrets of Stonehenge may have just been uncovered – by a music technologist.
Rupert Till from the University of Huddersfield has released an app that recreates the soundscape of the ancient temple as it would have originally been heard thousands of years ago, complete with the sounds of the Wilsford bone flute unearthed in a pit near the site, and the songs of owls, nightingales and corncrakes common to the region in Wiltshire. Till is one of a growing group of researchers which believes one of the core reasons for Stonehenge’s existence was its acoustic properties.
The ancient site, erected almost 5,000 years ago in the late Neolithic period, has remained a compelling mystery. In the 1920s, it was discovered that some of the nine-metre-tall, 25-tonne bluestones that make up the site were hauled almost 200 miles from the Preseli Hills in western Wales. The seemingly impossible logistics of how this occurred has confounded archaeologists, but a group of "archaeoacoustics" have instead been investigating the reason why the stones were moved this great distance.
In 2014, the Landscape and Perception Project at London's Royal College of Art tested thousands of stones at the Carn Menyn ridge in Wales and discovered that bluestones have incredible sonic properties, and can “ring” like a bell when hit. “You can almost see them as a pre-historic glockenspiel, if you like, and you could knock them and hear these tunes.” professor Tim Darvill, an expert on Stonehenge, told the BBC at the time. "And soundscapes of pre-history are something we're really just beginning to explore."
Researchers from the Universities of Salford, Huddersfield and Bristol, have been looking into this phenomena for close to a decade, digitally recreating soundfields using mathematical acoustic analysis gathered from lidar data of Stonehenge. In 2011, the fruits of this labour were unveiled at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, where visitors could walk through an immersive replica of the monoliths and listen to the ancient sounds of music, people and wildlife.
More:
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/stonehenge-acoustic-app-listen-to-history
