South African research suggests a ‘distinct echo’ attracted historical artists to 1 web site

The research web site, Kurukop, is in South Africa’s Northern Cape province, within the Nama Karoo area, the place the geological formation started to build up from about 300 million years in the past, earlier than the breakup of the tremendous continent Gondwanaland. 
| Picture Credit score: Neil Rusch/The Dialog

Physics doesn’t adequately clarify mirrored sound and echo results. Take as instance the echo-producing Echoplex, a magnetic tape machine that influenced the soundtrack of a era. Consider Led Zeppelin’s Complete Lotta Love (1969) and the echo on its violin sections. The echo coming from Hank Marvin’s guitar formed the sound of The Shadows within the late Fifties and Nineteen Sixties.

However are echoes and reverberations a passing function of musical appreciation, restricted to a era or two? Acoustic analysis at a rock artwork web site suggests not.

The research web site, Kurukop, is in South Africa’s Northern Cape province, within the Nama Karoo area, the place the geological formation started to build up from about 300 million years in the past, earlier than the breakup of the tremendous continent Gondwanaland. This eroded sandstone hill, remodeled by volcanic exercise, is marked with 112 petroglyphs, or rock engravings. The pictures depict numerous figures – eland, elephants, zebra, ostriches, wildebeest, rhinoceros and animal-human hybrids.

The gathering is just too numerous to be the work of 1 particular person or group of individuals. There’s nice variation in method and execution. There are photographs which can be a number of thousand years previous, an age estimate primarily based on oxidation of the rock floor in comparison with the oxidation of the pictures. Others are newer, created inside the final 2,000 years. The depictions have been made by hunter-gatherer San and Khoe herder individuals who visited Kurukop repeatedly.

What was it that saved bringing them again?

A part of the reply is a particular echo. That is important, firstly as a result of it confirms that the creation of rock artwork was mixed with efficiency – clapping, singing, dancing – which on this case was enhanced by echoes. The Kurukop echo additionally supplies a reference level for a mythological story from the area that speaks in regards to the relationship between echo, wind, mountain and breath.

Petroglyphs, engraved on rocks, have an apparent visible attraction. What’s essential and thrilling about this research is the invention that these photographs have an acoustic facet as effectively.

Measuring the echo

As a researcher fascinated about archaeoacoustics I first observed the echo whereas tenting on the web site. This was confirmed by my colleague Professor Sarah Wurz and my daughter Amy. The echo enveloped us after we clapped or made excessive pitched sounds. May the numerous Kurukop mark-makers have observed this too, we questioned? Intrigued, we returned to measure the echo.

We utilized a mix of strategies to see if there was a connection between echo and artwork. First we positioned every petroglyph on Kurukop, an space of 70,000 sq. metres, utilizing on-the-ground survey, drone imaging and GIS (Geographic Data System) strategies.

Subsequent, we measured the echo zone, utilizing what’s referred to as the impulse response methodology. Researchers at Stanford College used the identical process to measure the acoustic options of Turkey’s most well-known monument, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. The tactic permits researchers to seize details about an area’s acoustic structure. What the ears hear as reverberations and echoes, the devices measure objectively as depth, time-delay and frequency loss.

As soon as we’d accomplished each processes, we in contrast petroglyph distribution information and the echo sample. Our outcomes present that 60% of the petroglyphs have been created immediately within the echo zone. This implies that at Kurukop folks have been almost certainly to create photographs within the space that echoed strongly.

This is smart when contemplating how essential sound and efficiency have been to the Khoe and San folks. However sound sensibility just isn’t explicit to 1 group of individuals, or particular person. Reverberant sounds entice consideration and have finished so for hundreds of years in distinctly completely different cultures and in whichever approach the echo is created and enhanced – sacred house, magnetic play-back tape or the geomorphology of a rock outcrop. What’s noteworthy, given the Kurukop instance, is how mirrored sound is included and interpreted inside particular cultures.

The function of delusion

The Kurukop echo’s significance is borne out by a |Xam San delusion from the area. The story was recorded within the nineteenth century by Gideon Retief von Wielligh (1859-1932). He’s greatest identified in literary and folkloristic circles for his recording of |Xam narratives, which have been first printed in Afrikaans (1919-1921) after the |Xam language had change into extinct.

The story explains that Echo is daughter of Mountain and Wind. Narrative particulars introduce associations linked to wind and breath, that are entangled in Khoe and San searching and therapeutic practices.

Two concepts represented within the story are related to our research. First, mirrored sound is a wonderful instance of how folks, animals and different entities animate each other. The animation concept is strengthened and personified within the story. We be taught that Wind doesn’t communicate however “speaks by means of his daughter”. This narrative element would possibly finally be saying that everybody is animated by wind, breath and echo.

Secondly, the story hyperlinks music-making and echo. Speelman (participant or musician in Afrikaans), “the person who first found music”, engages Echo in dialogue and the reader is left questioning: who’s speaking to whom? This component of the story positive factors substance and resounds in a performative setting when echoes mix with music-making.

Collective reminiscence

The themes within the Echo delusion are strengthened at a spot like Kurukop the place echoes deliver story and soundscape collectively. This makes Kurukop a strong place and additional accounts for the petroglyphs.

The San and the Khoe left no written data: theirs have been oral cultures through which reminiscence and remembering are potent instruments.

Which means Kurukop and different locations prefer it act as exterior archives of collective reminiscence. A number of traces of exercise over lengthy durations of time usher the previous into the current. This enables cultural information to be transmitted from era to era. Communication by means of a residing previous contains connection to ancestors and it additionally endows Kurukop with a religious dimension.

This text is republished from The Dialog underneath a Inventive Commons license. Learn the unique article right here.