Did otherworldly music inspire Stonehenge?

Sara Reardon, reporter

(Image: Steven Waller)

Five thousand years ago, so the legend goes, two pipers played in a field while a circle of merry maidens danced around them. Then they all turned to stone, leaving Stonehenge to mystify us for millennia. Other theories about the stone circle's purpose include an alien observatory, a burial site and an acoustic stadium.

Here at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Vancouver, Canada, archaeoacoustician Steven Waller - an independent researcher based in La Mesa, California - threw yet another idea into the mix. The stone circle, he says, may have been inspired by an auditory illusion that occurs when two identical instruments, such as pipes, play the same note at the same time. A person walking in a circle around the pipers hears the note's volume decrease at certain points where the two sound waves collide and cancel one another out. At these spots, it sounds as though a giant pillar is blocking the sound.

Perhaps, Waller proposes, the ancients thought these silent points were invisible walls from the spirit world. They may have then arranged Stonehenge and the stone circles like it as very physical, 40-tonne incarnations of these walls.

To test whether the illusion holds true in real life, Waller took blindfolded volunteers out into an empty field and led them in a circle around two recorders that were playing the same note. Then he asked the volunteers to draw the space they thought they had walked through. All six of the volunteers drew a circle of pillars or archways between themselves and the recorders. "It's a very mystical phenomenon," Waller says, and would have been totally inexplicable to ancient people who didn't understand the physics of sound waves

Of course, like many of the hypotheses about Stonehenge, it's tough to prove. But Waller says that there is a strong association between music and stone circles: for instance, many of the United Kingdom's stone circles contain stone pairs called "piper stones."

Waller emphasises that his theory doesn't rule out any of the others about how light or sound may have played among the stones themselves after the monument was built. But he believes that ancient sounds deserve more serious consideration by archaeologists. "No one's paying attention to sound," he says, especially when modern tourist sites alter the entrances or structures of caves and architecture, destroying the sites' acoustics.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/1cba5cd1/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A120C0A20Cdid0Eotherworldly0Emusic0Einspire0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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