We have a pretty good idea what ancient history looked like, but we’re not so sure what it sounded like. Luckily, there’s a whole branch of science called archaeoacoustics that is working to find out.
Here are a few interesting things I learned about sound while researching The Exiled Queen: A Roman Era Historical Fantasy:
- In a forest, sight is the third sense in the order of usefulness, after hearing and smell.
- In winter, there’s more echo than in summer because the leaves are gone (depending on where you are on the planet, of course).
- The most important musical instrument during an ancient ritual was the drum, because it can create infrasound on demand, which then creates unusual sensations in the human body. Those sensations could then be explained in spiritual terms.
- The surface of the water helps propagate sound waves, so locations around lakes and streams are better for acoustic effects. Sound from a Viking boat on a lake would be amplified.
- Ancient rituals often happened at night, or in dimly lit chambers with flickering fire, to focus the attention on the auditory sense of the audience.
- Noisemaking was thought to scare away evil spirits during solar eclipses.
- In ancient times, poetry was sung, not intoned.
- and much more…
Two thousand years ago, when Andrada’s story takes place, sound was more important to people than it is today. Good hearing while hunting meant the difference between eating and being eaten. The world was quieter than it is today, and each sound carried more meaning than we could now imagine. Before the scientific understanding of acoustics, echoes were thought to be the voices of spirits speaking out of deep caverns or back from stone walls.
Sound waves are important in The Exiled Queen, but I’ll focus on one episode in the story, when Princess Andrada discovers a crystal bell in the Old Temple of Sehul. She has no way of knowing that the resonance created in the temple by ringing the bell affects her body through infrasound, which in turn affects her mind. There is science behind the magic Andrada experiences in the novel.
Stone Age Soundtracks
“Sound in the ancient world was conceived of as a supernatural phenomenon.” – Paul Devereux
In his book, Stone Age Soundtracks, archeologist Paul Devereux details his team’s experiments and findings at ancient Stone Age sites such as Stonehenge. As early as the Paleolithic times, people knew how to create sound from stone, caves, sticks, or water. They could alter the acoustic features of their natural environment, and they worshiped the gods and spirits they thought had answered their prayers (sometimes through sound).
“If in the ancient world sound was thought of as being so powerful, magical and sacred, then it would surely have been a considered factor in the establishment of a temple or sacred monument. The trouble with finding an answer to such a question is that we no longer have the ‘soundtrack’ to the ancient past. When we visit the ancient places, we wander around the ruins or the great stone structures trying to imagine the people who built these sites and worshipped at them, but we seldom hear them in our mind’s ear.” (p.65)
Resonance
Experiments conducted in megalithic (large stone) tombs revealed that most chambers have a sound frequency at which they naturally resonate (usually in the low male-voice range of 95–120 Hz) and that most edifices had been fine-tuned (with carvings and ledges, and holes and corbelled roofs) for those resonances.
In the Paleolithic caves of France, the walls painted with animals and peopl
e are also the locations that give the strongest and longest echoes in the entire cave, as though spirits answered back from the images on the walls. A chamber that resonates during the chanting or pronouncements of a high priest enhances the volume and reverberation of the man’s voice and adds to the commanding spiritual authority he projects onto his audience.
Infrasound
Infrasound is sound below human hearing range (20–20,000 Hz). While we cannot hear it, other parts of our bodies resonate at infrasound frequency, such as our eyeballs, our skull, our chest cavity. So being in the presence of infrasound can make someone’s vision blurry or unreliable, can make someone dizzy, sleepy, or disoriented, can make someone nauseous or anxious. In the old times, infrasound felt like the presence of otherworldly spirits.
People today can create infrasound with a large drum, but infrasound happens even on a windy day or during an electric storm. Sea waves breaking on the shore produce infrasound. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, whales, and elephants do too. Have you ever experienced an eerie feeling when there’s a storm outside? It’s probably your body perceiving infrasound without hearing it. Even today, the first explanation for that weird feeling is spirits and ghosts. And infrasound can even come from a poorly assembled fan in your house.
The Treasury of Atreus
In The Exiled Queen, I partially modeled the inner chamber of the Old Temple of Sehul on a tholos tomb: the misnamed Treasury of Atreus in Mycenae, Greece (built around 1250 BCE).
“When just a solitary visitor quietly enters the chamber at the Treasury of Atreus and places an ear close to the great curving wall, a buzzing sound can be heard—a buzzing like that of a swarm of bees, though a little softer. Was this supposed to be the spirits of the nobility being laid to rest there? The buzzing is an acoustic distortion of the distant background sounds of the outside world coming in through the doorway, probably akin to the effect of so-called ‘whispering galleries.’” – Stone Age Soundtracks, p. 67
When Andrada enters the Old Temple of Sehul and rings the crystal bell, she experiences the effects of resonance and infrasound on her internal organs. The vagus nerve (the longest cranial nerve in the body) also reacts to sound vibrations, changing the way she perceives her reality.
Bonus: Visible sound
This bit didn’t make it into the novel because the story didn’t need it—even though I thought it was super cool. But the most amazing feature of the megalithic tombs was visible sound.
During rituals where incense, smoke, steam, and dust filled the chambers and passageways, a standing wave in the air would force tiny particles to coalesce into pockets of high density and make them visible inside a closed space under a focused beam of sunlight.
That focused sunbeam usually entered the chamber only once a year, during a solstice or equinox. Imagine being in that place, with infrasound from drums messing with your senses, and seeing these ghost-like creatures take shape and rise before your eyes. You’d believe whatever the high priest told you, wouldn’t you?
Andrada truly believes that what she experiences is magic from the gods, and that’s why The Exiled Queen is a historical fantasy (plus the alternate history and timeline). Does this look at the science of sound make the magic in the story more or less compelling to you, the reader? Let me know with an email reply.
Book recommendation: If you liked this conversation, you might also enjoy Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers by Matt Kaplan.
