All right, I don’t have an appropriate category heading, but this is just neat-o. Greg sent me this Slash-dot article:

Musicians recently unlocked a 600 year old mystery that had been encoded into the walls of the Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, the one featured in “The Da Vinci Code.” The song was carved into the walls of the chapel in the form of geometric shapes that a father-son team — both are musicians and the father is an ex-Royal Air Force code breaker — finally matched to so-called Chladni patterns (see the Wikipedia article on cymatics). The recovered melody was paired with traditional lyrics (translated into Latin) and recorded; the result can be heard in this video (also linked from the musicians’ website). The video also gives a visual representation of how the engravings match up to the cymatic patterns.”

Here’s the video they’re talking about:


Having watched it, there are things I still don’t understand, but maybe a trained musician could figure it out. What the father and son figured out was a 13-note scale and a couple of specifically significant notes. But how did they get the motet from that? Or are they saying that that scale is something different than what we use now? Like I said, I couldn’t quite follow that part.

Other question that the Wikipedia article didn’t address: How long have people known about cymatic patterns? Unless they knew about them 600 years ago, how could they have come up with that musical code?

Going off to the musicians’ website didn’t help me with that, but it did take me off on this tangent:

Concealed Music?

Why would anyone want to hide music? Could it be threatening or dangerous to someone or something? Unless it was very special piece that contained magical, harmonic and resonant properties that resonated in sympathy with spiritual beliefs. Was this music ‘outlawed’ by the Catholic church for some reason?

That’s it. There’s nothing the Catholic Church hates more than music in a chapel. And this is obviously a very dangerous motet. Good thinking.

Well, so the poor old Catholic Church still gets implicated somehow. But if everyone gets to hazard a guess, I think the more obvious answer is that it wasn’t made into a cipher out of fear or heterodoxy. I think it was made into a cipher so that it would be a mystery. And in that way, it’s no different than the many other things in Western and Eastern Church art, architecture and music that speak to the mystery of our faith. Why couldn’t this have been another one? For that matter, why is it that everyone loves trying to solve the puzzles of the historic Church but would rather come up with totally flimsy answers rather than notice the consistent answer of orthodox Christian beliefs?

Oh well. Lots of questions and no answers. Just another day with a ‘y’ in it. Anyway, the music is pretty and the thing about cymatic patterns is just fascinating.