Sonic Stonehenge
Taking it back to the beginning (of human history)
It was January in Piacenza, a small town in the north of Italy with a charming square and few tourists in the late afternoon. We had a few hours to kill before our train so we wandered aimlessly until we turned down a side street and came across a local modern art museum. It was free, and unsurprisingly so, as one exhibit featured cardstock cutouts of jungle animals glued to popsicle sticks that moved on a sprawling mechanism resembling a toy train.
My confusion about the work was cut short by a notification on my phone from an editor whom I hadn’t worked with in a while. As I started to read the message, I realized it was time to leave the gallery.
By now the main plaza was enveloped in shadow and the cold January wind had driven most people inside. We tucked into a bustling cafe and ordered two Italian hot chocolates, which were thick enough to be served with a spoon and didn’t bear any similarity to packets of powdered Swiss Miss.
“The BBC wants us to go to Stonehenge,” I told Mohamed. “They want a video and an article about new research relating to how it sounded.”
We stared at each other. It was great news, but there was one issue: We had exactly 10 days until we were scheduled to fly to Thailand and begin a four-month trip in Asia, and the editor had made it clear that the deadline, in two months from now, could not be adjusted.
I had always wanted to visit Stonehenge, and it’s not every day that the opportunity to film one of the most ancient, mysterious monuments in the world comes along, so we decided that some way, somehow, we would have to make it work.
Within a few days, we were able to get in touch with Trevor Cox, the Manchester-area professor at the center of the Stonehenge research. He was available to film, but the logistics were a bit more complicated.
The first obstacle we encountered was our lack of understanding of England’s geography. Stonehenge is located in the far south of the country, near Salisbury, while the research was being conducted at the University of Salford, next to Manchester in the North. We resigned ourselves to the fact that a last minute, three-day trip to the UK was neither going to be cheap nor ecological.
After arriving at Heathrow on a drizzly Thursday, we sat in our rental car trying to understand why on Earth there is not one universally accepted side of the road to drive on. We shook off the nerves and started off on our two-hour journey to Stonehenge, stopping only to buy some gloves and scarf down a thick square of cheese pizza.
As we came over the crest of a rolling hill, Stonehenge emerged framed by grazing sheep in a dreamy pastoralist picture. The clouds cleared momentarily and I felt a little awestruck. For me, Stonehenge was a place I had read about, but couldn’t really wrap my head around, and although it was a bit smaller than the pictures, I was impressived.
Stonehenge lends itself quite well to folklore because of the fact that so little is known about its purpose. How and why, for example, did our earliest ancestors manage to stack stones in a formation that perfectly aligns with the summer and winter solstice? And why did they seemingly abandon the site a few thousands years after it was built?
Our visit was cut short by a cold rain and our need to return the rental car before our flight to Manchester. What I gathered from my time at Stonehenge:
A “henge” is a prehistoric monument that is circular in shape and can be made of mounded earth, stone, or wood. Stonehenge is the most famous, but there are actually hundreds of henges across modern-day UK and France.
While excavating the site, archeologists discovered human and animal remains but a perplexing lack of ancient tools or artifacts, which suggests that people did not live close to the site and might have used it for rituals or as a graveyard.
Researchers theorize simple sleds might have been used to slide the stones to the location as Stonehenge was first constructed about 5,000 years ago, before the invention of the wheel.
The next day, we took a short bus ride from our hotel in downtown Manchester to the University of Salford. The campus was quite lively, even though the cinder block hallways of the acoustics building didn’t exactly exude joy.
We were greeted by Professor Cox, whose research is widely read and respected in the acoustics sphere. While most of his work revolves around improving the quality of life for those with hearing loss, over the past few years he’d been inundated with requests like ours to talk about his Stonehenge project.
Cox led us down another hallway into a lab space that looked like a cross between the backstage of a theater and a construction site. He opened a smaller door of room labeled as the “semi-anechoic chamber.” The walls and ceiling were covered in geometric gray foam meant to absorb virtually all noise in the room.
In the center of the floor, stood a shin-high replica of Stonehenge, but not the one we’d seen the day before. Cox explained that his model is based on archeologists best guess as to what the site looked like 4,000 years ago when it was considerably more in-tact. The 1/12 scale model is the first of its kind ever made for a prehistoric site.
By playing certain frequencies around the stones and using tiny microphones to pick them up, Cox has been able to determine how the structure of Stonehenge affected sound, and how its acoustic properties might have influenced its purpose. Here’s what I learned:
We can’t say for sure that Stonehenge was built for acoustic purposes, in fact it likely wasn’t, according to Cox.
The question is more likely whether the boost the stones give to the voice and music became part of its purpose later on.
We would consider Stonehenge’s reverberation quite mild today but it would have sounded much more exciting to our ancestors than the building-dwelling humans of today.
After spending the afternoon with Cox and learning more about the acoustics of Stonehenge than could possibly fit into my article, we returned to Manchester to explore before our return flight to Nice a day later.
Manchester turned out to be a vibrant city with friendly people and shiny new hotels surrounding old churches and two-story row houses. To escape the rain, we ducked into The John Rylands Library, a beautiful, gothic library set on two floors that can only be described as a living Harry Potter set. For lunch, we ate noodles at Wagamama, followed by Nando’s chicken and rice for dinner, checking off our list of classic UK fast-casual chains.
The next day, we took the footage back to Nice, and didn’t touch it until many weeks later in Hat Yai, in the far south of Thailand, almost at the border with Malaysia.
How interesting. If you stand in a certain spot in one of the chambered cairns at Camster, Caithness and talk loudly, the sound reverberates, but the reverberation is only audible to the person doing the talking.