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Posted by Katharine M. J. Osborne May 30, 2007 |
Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland has recently been made infamous by the book and movie "The Da Vinci Code". In the conspiracy circles there is a lot of speculation about whether or not the chapel was built by the Knights Templar in secret, and whether it contains the Holy Grail - whatever that might be.
What peaked my interest about the chapel lately is that a composer familiar with cymatics (the visualization of sound) has "decoded" the images on a series of boxes carved into the pillars in the chapel. The images are simple, curving, symmetrical patterns. They could just be abstract embellishment. The composer has matched the patterns on the boxes to cymatic patterns (technically Chladni patterns) to find a corresponding frequency, and then composed music using the sequence (10 notes I think). See an explanatory video.
The resulting composition is quite beautiful, but since it is based on such a short sequence of notes I wonder whether it is just a coincidence. For that matter, what makes a series of sounds into a tune in the human mind?
A few years ago PBS produced an ad for itself featuring a composer frustrated at his piano. He turns and looks out the window to see several birds landing on the power lines outside. He becomes inspired and uses the sequence of the landing birds to compose a song. Beauty can be found in randomness.
What do you think?