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Rock Art Acoustics: South African Study Suggests Distinct Echo Attracted Ancient Artists to One Site | Ancient Origins
Rock Artacoustics, South African Studies suggests distinct echo attracted ancient artists to one's sight. Neil Rush slashed the conversation. Physics does not adequately explain reflected sound and echo effects. Take as example the echo producing echoplex, a magnetic tape device that influenced the soundtrack of a generation. Think of Led Zeppelin's whole lot of love, 1969, and the echo on its violent sections. The echo coming from Hank Marvin's guitar shaped the sound of the shadows in the late 1950s and 1960s. But our echoes and reverberations, a passing feature of musical appreciation, limited to a generation or two. Acoustic research at a rock art site suggests not. The study site, Coracop, is in South Africa's northern Cape Province in the Namakeru region, where the geological formation began to accumulate from about 300 million years ago before the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwannaland. This eroded sandstone hill, transformed by volcanic activity, is marked with 112 petroglyphs or rock engravings. The images depict various figures, island, elephants, zebra, ostriches, wildebeest, rhinoceros, and animal human hybrids. Indigenous artists reviving ancient rock art themes, archaeoacoustics and ancient architecture, megaliths, music, and the mind. The collection is too diverse to be the work of one person or group of people. There's great variation in technique and execution. There are images that are several thousand years old, an age estimate based on oxidation of the rock surface compared to the oxidation of the images. Others are more recent, created within the last two thousand years. The depictions were made by hunter-gatherers San and co-herter people who visited Churikop repeatedly. What was it that kept bringing them back? Part of the answer is a distinctive echo. This is significant, firstly because it confirms that the creation of rock art was combined with performance, clapping, singing, dancing, which in this case was enhanced by echoes. The Churikop echo also provides a reference point for a mythological story from the region that speaks about the relationship between echo, wind, mountain, and breath. Petroglyphs engraved on rocks have an obvious visual attraction. What is important and exciting about this study is the discovery that these images have an acoustic aspect as well. Measuring the echo, as a researcher interested in archaeoacoustics, I first noticed the echo while camping at the site. This was confirmed by my colleague Professor Sarah Wors and my daughter, Amy. The echo enveloped us when we clapped or made high-pitched sounds. Could the many Churikop markmakers have noticed this too? We wondered, intrigued, we returned to measure the echo. Ancient acoustic artifacts and communication with the gods, a whopping 25% of prehistoric rock art could be children's art study. We applied a combination of techniques to see if there was a connection between echo and art. First, we located each petroglyph on Churikop, an area of 70,000 square meters, using on-the-ground survey, drone imaging, and GIS, geographic information system techniques. Next, we measured the echo zone using what's called the impulse response method. Researchers at Stanford University used the same procedure to measure the acoustic features of Turkey's most famous monument, the Hagia Sophia and Istanbul. The method allows researchers to capture information about a space's acoustic architecture. What the ears hear as reverberations and echoes, the instruments measure objectively as intensity, time delay, and frequency loss. Once we'd completed both processes, we compared petroglyph distribution data and the echo pattern. Our results show that 60% of the petroglyphs were created directly in the echo zone. This suggests that at Churikop people were most likely to create images in the area that echoed strongly. This makes sense when considering how important sound and performance were to the co and sand people. But sound sensibility is not particular to one group of people or person. Reverberant sounds attract attention and have done so for thousands of years in distinctly different cultures and in whichever way the echo is created and enhanced. Sacred space, magnetic playback tape, or the geomorphology of a rock out crop. What is noteworthy, given the Churikop example, is how reflected sound is included and interpreted within specific cultures. The role of myth. The Churikop echo's significance is born out by AXAM sand myth from the region. The story was recorded in the 19th century by Gideon Ritti von Wielei, 1859 to 1932. He is best known in literary and folkloristic circles for his recording of XAM narratives, which were first published in Afrikaats, 1919 to 1921. After the XAM language had become extinct, the story explains that echo is daughter of mountain and wind. Narrative details introduce associations connected to wind and breath, which are entangled in co and sand hunting and healing practices. Two ideas represented in the story are relevant to our study. First, reflected sound is a fine example of how people, animals, and other entities animate one another. The animation idea is reinforced and personified in the story. We learn that wind does not speak but speaks through his daughter. This narrative detail might ultimately be saying that everyone is animated by wind, breath, and echo. Secondly, the story links music making and echo. Spielman, player, or musician in Afrikaats, the man who first discovered music, engages echo in dialogue, and the reader is left wondering, who is talking to whom. This element of the story gains substance and resounds in a performative setting when echoes combine with music making. Collective memory. The themes in the echo myth are reinforced at a place like Coracop where echoes bring story and soundscape together. This makes Coracop a powerful place and further accounts for the petroglyphs. The sand and the co-left no written records. There's where oral cultures in which memory and remembering are potent tools. This means that Coracop and other places like it act as external archives of collective memory. Multiple traces of activity over long periods of time usher the past into the present. This allows cultural knowledge to be transmitted from generation to generation. Communication through a living past includes connection to ancestors, and it also endows Coracop with a spiritual dimension. Source. Malelwafaha Sabasotho/CC by S.A. 4.0. This article was originally published under the title "Rock Artacoustics". South African Studies suggests that a distinct echo attracted ancient artists back to one site by Neil Rush on the conversation and has been republished under a Creative Commons license.