“In that case, I think you should stand over here,” Paul Cummings instructed, as he wheeled an enormous bronze disc three feet back from the concrete wall of his studio, and gestured me to stand behind a suspended, shiny gong one meter in diameter.
I have come to the Mystery School of Sound—an experimental sonic studio run by twin brothers Mark and Paul Cummings in the East End of London—where multiple friends promised I could feel the tactile nature of sound in ways I’ve never experienced in any standard-issue “sound healing” session. Sound waves, we often forget, are felt physically by our bodies as well as processed cognitively through our ears: it is “touch at a distance”, as one apt description goes.
“Look, I would love to believe in ‘sound healing’—I really would,” I explained to Cummings beforehand. “I love music more than anything—and few things make me feel better than staying up all night next to an enormous sound system and letting the subwoofers relax me to the core. But every single ‘sound healing’ session I’ve been to, with gongs, bells, whistles, and rattles… all of them just left me bored and irritated. I needed more.”
Music is my medicine, my daily tonic, and the closest thing I have to an object of worship. I was raised by a rock promoter in Toronto who worked from home. Every room was filled all day, every day with a mosaic of musical forms at max volume: grunge, heavy metal, jazz, punk, funk, opera—you name it, he played it. Moreover, religion played no part in my childhood. I’ve never once been to Sunday Service, and only read passages from the Bible for the first time in my literary studies at university.
Therefore, when Facebook asked me 15 years ago to state my religious beliefs in my profile, I could only type this:
“Turn up the bass.”
So if anyone should appreciate the tactile power of sound, it’s me.
“I think I know what you need,” said Cummings, grabbing a rubber mallet. “I believe you will find this more visceral… ” And he was right. Standing inches from the concave side of the gong, I could feel the low rumbling sound waves right in my bones. My skin prickled with goosebumps, my scalp tingled, and my hair stood on end. “That’s remarkable,” I said. “We are often asked what kind of speakers we have hooked up to the gongs,” Cummings laughed. “No, we don’t use speakers… We don’t need to.”
He’s right: none of us need to.
BEFORE THE AGE OF ELECTRICITY
Humans didn’t always rely on magnets, metal coils, and electrical inputs to create amplified sound. Though today, speakers are ubiquitous—from enormous rigs in thumping nightclubs, to sleek high-end sound systems in the apartments of audiophiles, to the tiny amplifiers in the ear-buds of harried commuters—we easily forget that amplified and recorded sound has only been with us for a century. For the rest of human history, all music—indeed, all forms of sonic communication, from political speeches to orchestral masterpieces—were experienced live, in person, and for the most part, communally. Without electricity to boost the volume, our ancestors had to pay far greater attention to the shapes of the venues they used for their messages.
Now researchers are re-discovering the acoustic secrets of some of the world’s most mysterious, fascinating, important, and ancient constructions, confirming that we modern sound junkies didn’t invent the science of acoustics. Hominids were sound engineers from the very beginning, building temples, pyramids, churches, tombs, and amphitheaters to create the most powerful sounds possible—simply through a combination of clever geometry and carefully chosen materials.
Centuries ago, architects would never fail to consider acoustics in their designs for performance venues and places of worship, all of which were engineered to allow one person to project their voice to as many people as possible. Consider the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, an amphitheater carved into the hillside of the Acropolis of Athens, completed in 161 AD. It can seat 5,000 people—nearly five times more than the main hall at the National Theatre in London. The deep curves of this bowl-shaped structure ensured that every single audience member, right up to the very back row 40 meters (131 feet) from the stage, could hear the actors—even if they were whispering.
“I was shocked when I first turned up to the venue— photos did not prepare me for walking into that space. It is truly special,” said Max Cooper, an audiovisual artist and musician who was invited to perform in the ancient theatre last year. “The unusual thing about this ancient place is that it’s huge—I mean, really huge—but the acoustics of it feel very close. You feel like you’re in a much smaller room, and I think that surreal feeling of intimacy is part of the magic.”
Without fossil fuels, combustion engines, electrical cables, or digital calculators, the ancients were nonetheless capable of designing and sculpting venues out of pure rock that could amplify sounds to extraordinary degrees. And today? Raves are held in abandoned rectangular ware- houses, nightclubs are fashioned inside cramped basements, and the world’s biggest stars perform in boxy sports arenas— none of which could broadcast music to the back row without powerful sound systems.
“I think that the amplification of music with electronic technology has allowed us to become lazy,” said Cooper. “Ancient structures had to actually work with the reflections
of the stones, and the features of the space, in order to make the acoustics work. That’s largely been lost in modern architecture.”
And not only were our acoustic instincts lost in modern architecture, our understanding of our ancestors’ sophistication as sound engineers was lost as well—until now.
A NEW SCIENCE
Enter: archaeoacoustics, an emerging field of scientific study that combines insights from architecture, archaeology, history, psychology, neuroscience, engineering, physics, and— of course—acoustics in an attempt to reconstruct the sonic landscape of our past. By recreating what ancient structures once sounded like, researchers hope we can fully appreciate how our ancestors used, felt, experienced, and understood the world around them.
“This is an aspect of culture that was completely over- looked before now—which is unfortunate because sound has always been extremely important to the human experience,” said archaeologist Professor Margarita Díaz-Andreu of the University of Barcelona. “In fact, sound was possibly even more important in the past compared to the present day.”
Physicist and author Professor Trevor Cox of the University of Salford, who has studied the acoustics of Stonehenge, agrees that our ancestors were likely far more attuned to the sounds of the world around them than we are today, living in a world dominated by urban and industrial rackets, which we shut out in the privacy of headphones. “We became very visually dominated as a species with the introduction of writing, but it’s likely that in ancient times sound would have been much more important,” said Prof Cox.
Why has the sonic nature of our past been overlooked? For one, “behavior doesn’t fossilize”, as anthropologists like to say. And neither do sound waves. This leaves archaeologists with the enormous challenge of reconstructing what the past sounded like—requiring them to bring multiple disciplines together in a unique combination of scientific scrutiny, artistic insight, old-fashioned detective work—and occasional serendipity.
Though the field of archaeoacoustics is comparatively new—just a handful of decades old—researchers have already made a number of discoveries that have transformed how we perceive our ancestors and the evolution of human cognition.
Some of the earliest pieces of evidence for the importance of sound in ancient spaces have come from the earliest traces: Paleolithic rock art painted by our cave-dwelling ancestors. Beginning in the 1980s, French archaeologists began to notice a correlation between the placement of cave art and the acoustics of the location. In Paleolithic sites across Spain and France—some as old as 40,000 years—the highest density of paintings is typically found at points within the caves that boast the best acoustics, resulting in high levels of resonance, reverberations, and echoes.
Traditional thinking goes that humans moved into the depths of caves for safety and warmth. Now acoustic insights imply we also used specific points within those caverns for a variety of rituals, and our ancestors kept note of the best locations by marking them with illustrations. Just as modern sound engineers bark “check check … mike check” into the PA before a gig, ensuring the equipment is properly calibrated, our ancestors scoured the landscape for the best natural theaters and kept note of what worked.
Moreover, they not only scoured the Earth—they actually played the Earth, using the landscape itself as an instrument. Scientists in France noted in the 1980s that ochre markings on many stalagmite and stalactite formations in ancient cave sites mark points on the rock that produce precise tones when struck—suggesting we once used entire caves as lithophones (xylophones formed of stone). Lithophones in fact have been found on every continent except Antarctica, including the most ancient human sites in Africa.
Such findings are intriguing, very recent, and for the most part, only discovered by accident when archaeologists happened to notice unusual echoes during excavations. Very few researchers have actually performed experiments within these spaces, largely due to lack of funding—or a lack of awareness in mainstream archaeology.
Which is why Professor Díaz-Andreu is leading a three-year research project, funded by the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, to examine rock art and the surrounding acoustics in France, Italy, and Spain to see what else may be discovered. Their goal is not only to map the acoustics of the spaces, but also to go one step further and consider how those environments and sounds would have affected the brains, bodies, minds, and emotions of the people who built them. By including neuroscientists and physiologists in the work, Professor Díaz-Andreu hopes to lead the way in a new field she calls “experimental psychoarchaeoacoustics”.
“What we are really trying to understand are the immaterial aspects of culture—important things for which there are no direct traces,” said Professor Díaz-Andreu. “Really, this research is linked to the senses, and how humans felt their surroundings at the time.”
Psychologist Dr. Miriam Kolar, who is part of a Stanford University team that for 15 years has studied an enormous pre-Inca site in Peru known as Chavín de Huántar, agrees that the dimensions or properties of ancient sites are not as important as what they can tell us about the people who built them.
“It’s not really the sonic qualities about a building, or a cave, or an instrument—it’s how that space influenced the human brain, and what that can teach us about their behavior,” she said.
Figuring out what took place at the Peruvian site is tremendously difficult, as it is extremely degraded, long abandoned, and the Incans did not use writing. Moreover, it is huge: “The monumentality of the scale is just amazing,” said Kolar.
Nonetheless, Stanford researchers have made a few remarkable discoveries, such as finding 20 conch shells with identically trimmed tips, all of which could produce musical notes when played like horns. Given that the shells came from the ocean, 500 miles away, this finding is clearly significant.
“Clearly this was a gathering center—and given the size, it was important,” said Kolar. “We’re not just thinking about sound in these spaces—we’re thinking about how sound connected humans with their environment—and with other humans.”
MYSTERIES OF MONUMENTS
“There’s always an assumption when studying past cultures and societies that they weren’t as intelligent as we are today with all our technological sophistication—and that’s just plain wrong,” said Professor Cox. “They were just intelligent about different things, in different ways.”
Professor Cox made headlines two years ago by reconstructing a scale model of Stonehenge to “set the record straight about what acoustically the space would have been like,” he said. It is difficult today to imagine what the monument would have sounded like, because so many of the original 157 stones have been removed. Cox’s solution? Recreate the original formation with a 3D printed scale model, and perform a range of experiments in a sound-proof recording studio.
“These stones were massive—it would have been like a forest of stones around you,” he said. “That would have made a huge difference to how much sound would have been reflected on the outside—and how much amplified on the inside.”
Publishing his results in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2020, Cox’s results indicate that the site would not have been used for feasts or celebrations, but for private gatherings: as a sonic cocoon, it would have been easier to make your voice heard by those within the stone circle—and easy to avoid being heard by anyone outside it.
Cox’s hypothesis—as with any theory related to Stonehenge—naturally received a great amount of press coverage, as well as passionate (and often eccentric) debates online.
“Anything you do at Stonehenge gets a sort of fairy dust sprinkled on it in terms of the interest you get,” he said.
And no ancient site gets more “fairy dust”, could be more shrouded in mystery, or the subject of so many fringe theories, than the Great Pyramid of Giza. How—and why—the Egyptians could construct such an enormous structure in 2600 BC with stones weighing up to 10 tons (9 tonnes) each, has forever fascinated and baffled us. How on earth did they do it? Sorcery, magic, and aliens have all been invoked.
Archaeologists however have largely agreed on one thing, which is that the Great Pyramid was constructed for the same purpose as the smaller pyramids in the Valley of the Kings: as a tomb. In the center of the Pyramid lies a room known as the “King’s Chamber”, where it is assumed the Pharaoh’s corpse would have been put to rest in a rectangular box made of rose quartz that lies in the middle of the room.
But many amateur archaeologists, Egyptologists and acousticians have long doubted this received wisdom. For one, the King’s Chamber is above ground—in other tombs throughout Egypt, burial chambers are found below ground.
Two, the chamber is undecorated—other burial tombs are covered in carvings, hieroglyphs, and statues. Three, Egyptians were renowned for burying their dead with possessions, from jewelry to slaves. None have ever been found in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid.
“So what was the purpose of this room? I’m sorry but I just don’t believe it was a sarcophagus: I think it was an acoustic technology,” said Tom Middleton, a renowned electronic musician and sound designer who has worked with Aphex Twin, Warp Records, and more legendary names from the history of electronica. “Walking into the King’s Chamber feels like walking into a temple of reverberant sound—it literally feels like an acoustic chamber.”
Middleton is not the first to suggest that the Pyramid was actually designed for sonic effects. Rogue archaeologists have suggested for decades that the diagonal shafts that connect to the King’s Chamber were explicitly built to channel wind inwards to produce clear tones—just as we can make bottles “sing” by blowing over the top. Theoretically, the Egyptians would have been inspired by the sounds created in caverns on windy days.
“Natural environments have incredible acoustic properties that deliver this sense of wonder and awe, and a connection to the divine—hence why temples and churches make you instantly fall silent when you enter them,” said Middleton.
“There’s something about spacious and expansive places that extends your sense of self.”
Pen and paper calculations demonstrate little. The only way to test the idea was to travel to Egypt and see if “standing waves” of sound could be created in the chamber by having a dozen people sing in unison through a range of tones to discover the “fundamental frequency”: the one precise tone that would reverberate.
Carl Smith, Director of the Learning Technology Research Centre (LTRC) and Principal Research Fellow at Ravensbourne University London, who spent a decade examining ancient architecture in England and around the world, joined Middleton last autumn for the experiment.
“Being in that initiation chamber within the King’s Chamber made me feel like I was being pulled back in time—palpably. It was transcendent,” he said. And hearing the toning of the group reverberate within the larger chamber amplified the effect: “It was like having an auditory architectural conversation with the monument itself.”
Their ultimate goal, however, isn’t simply to work out why the Pyramid was built: it’s to deepen our understanding of the role of sound in human evolution. What is sound? Why is it so powerful? And what can we learn from the past to discover what could be possible today?
What will be discovered in the coming years remains to be seen, but one thing is already certain: our ancestors were incredibly sophisticated sound engineers, and many of their secrets can be rediscovered—we just need to learn how to listen.