We can finally hear the long hidden music of the stone age.
First response to the headline: I’ve wondered about this for a long time. There’s some evidence that pottery made on wheels preserves sound made while the pot was being shaped. The pot is basically a dictaphone cylinder and the thumbs are the diaphragm. Paintings could do the same if you knew the direction and timing of the brushstrokes, which is pretty much impossible.
But the headline is misleading. The article isn’t about playing back recorded sound. Paintings in caves aren’t audible; they were painted in resonant places. The painting tells you where the sacred resonant place is. Paintings are album covers, not the grooves on the record.
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That first researcher who used song to bring a new dimension to our understanding of Stone Age people was a French musicologist called Iégor Reznikoff. He spent years vocalising inside palaeolithic caves in use from 18,000 to 11,000 years ago in his homeland before documenting his findings in the late 1980s. Counting the seconds between echoes, he noted a relationship between the placement of rock art and acoustic phenomena.
Reznikoff’s methods of talking to the walls lacked rigour, and his conclusions were largely ignored by archaeologists. But his ideas reverberated around the fringes of academia, where the emerging field of archaeoacoustics was struggling for recognition. Among the first to expand upon his findings was Steve Waller at the American Rock Art Research Association, who recorded echoes of up to 31 decibels at some decorated spots in deep caves in France, while unpainted walls in the same caverns were acoustically dead.
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A researcher in Spain noticed that paintings were found in acoustical funnels where external sounds are concentrated. Outside of caves, such channels are only observable in certain atmospheric conditions. Hills form partial channels but you don’t get the pipe effect unless cloud layers or inversions reflect sound downward. Last week while out walking I heard “nearby” train whistles. Those downtown crossings are 4 miles from here, normally inaudible until a low cloud layer and the hill to the east formed a pipe.
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Another clue about the sorts of sounds prehistoric people made at these decorated rock faces comes from the painted Isturitz cave in France, where 35,000-year-old flutes made from vulture bones have been found. By playing replicas of these prehistoric instruments inside the caverns where they were discovered, Till became the first person since the Stone Age to experience their ritual potential. “Previously, I’d only ever heard these bone flutes in classrooms or in concert halls, where they have quite a polite sound, a small sound,” he says. “But then you take them into the cave and they produce this enormous, soaring sound, which transforms the cave into a space that sings.”
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In other words, the paintings are in chapels, places where the influence of the universe is strong and our own music is reinforced. Builders of churches replicated those natural chapels with domed ceilings and paintings.
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Reprinting my previous thoughts on this question, from a time when my younger brain worked better:
Humans have developed two ways of recording and playing sensory impressions.
For each sense, two-dimensional pigment application or ‘writing’ came first, and mechanical methods came VASTLY later or not at all.
Cave paintings are about 30k years old. Representing phonemes with symbols is nominally about 5k years old, but that’s a fine distinction. We were really painting stories for future reference. Why did Og bother to paint an elk? Not to deconstruct neomaterialist pansexuality. He was expressing a sentence that could also be spoken. “I killed this elk here.”
So cave paintings count as a simultaneous development for both vision and speech. Though we can’t get into the heads of those ancients, I expect a cave painting was meant to call up the entire sensory picture of the elk or waterhole or tree, including smell and taste and the action of hunting or drinking or picking.
Distinctions came later.
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On the mechanical side, output devices came first, followed by input.
Output of vision: Magic lanterns or phantasmagoria, around 1600. Projected paintings or drawings.
Input of vision: Photography, 1840s.
Output of sound: Signal drums and bells, extremely old. Maybe older than painting.
Input of sound: Phonograph, 1877. As I’ve noted, this is the ONLY major invention that happened exactly once without any gradual buildup of ideas.
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Well, where are the other senses? Specifically, where is smell? We don’t even have a ‘writing’ for smell. We have a dozen words that can be applied loosely, but without any precision or validity. We can name the emitters of a few smells validly: skunk, marijuana, rose.
If our visual representations were as poor as our olfactory, we wouldn’t be able to name colors or intensities; we’d only be able to say “Draw a house” or “Draw an elk”. As with smell, this would only work for animals and plants, because human products are non-standardized.
Mechanical playing of arbitrarily chosen smells, parallel to the magic lantern, has been around for a long time. It began with incense in religious ceremonies, and branched off to the rare and brief Smell-O-Vision in movies around 1930. Some computer-based smell generators have been advertised, but none have become commercially available. It’s not clear that they even exist. (Try to find actual reviews by people who have actually tried the gadgets!)
Mechanical recording of smell is supposedly in development, but it’s solely in the hands of tyrants who will use it to spot bombs or other illegal chemicals. Dogs perform this job so beautifully that there’s no major pressure to develop electronic devices.
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Beyond smell, we have a few other well-defined senses. Taste doesn’t really count; most of what we call ‘taste’ is just smell. Skin can detect light, heat, pressure, and ‘presence’, but those are so localized that there’s no good reason to record them.
Kinesthesia is the most important. Position, velocity, acceleration. There are systems of ‘writing’ for kinesthetic variables like Labanotation. We can record these variables accurately with photocells and accelerometers, and we can replay them directly with big expensive flight simulators. We can also replay them with magnetic stimulation of the cochlea, but this is so invasive that it’s not likely to become commercial, and probably shouldn’t. A similar method can invoke smells, but again could be too dangerous for common use.
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