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posted by Fnord666 on Monday July 15 2019, @01:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the is-there-an-echo-in-here? dept.

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Mini-model of Stonehenge reveals how voices would have carried in original ancient monument

A team of researchers at the University of Salford in the U.K. has revealed how voices would have sounded 4,000 years ago inside of the Stonehenge monument. The group made a recording of their efforts and posted the results on SoundCloud.

Stonehenge is, of course, a monument built roughly 5,000 years ago by Neolithic people for unknown reasons—they left behind no written records. In modern times, the monument has become famous the world over, and attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. The researchers explored what a human voice would have sounded like inside the monument during its heyday. To find out, they applied a modern technique that has been used to help architects build concert halls with optimal sound characteristics. The technique involves building a small-scale model of a building prior to construction and blasting sounds at it at 12 times their normal frequency in a sound chamber to overcome the size differences.

[...] The researchers claim the voice in the recording sounds like it would have were the team member to have stood in the center of the monument while speaking all those years ago. They note that despite large spaces between the stones, a person's voice would have reverberated around the monument, producing an echoing effect. They also suggest it is not likely that the people who built the monument knew what impact it would have on a speaker's voice, but point out that it seems likely they would have taken advantage of the impressive acoustics.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Monday July 15 2019, @03:00PM (3 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Monday July 15 2019, @03:00PM (#867202)

    It's not like Stonehenge was the first henge ever built - the henge-building cultures had been around for a long time already. If it really is a genuine effect, I'm sure somebody had noticed the effect over the preceding millenia, even if they didn't understand exactly why it was happening. I'm sure it added to the feel of magic around the place, and probably helped contribute to further henge-building.

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  • (Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday July 15 2019, @05:43PM (1 child)

    by nitehawk214 (1304) on Monday July 15 2019, @05:43PM (#867262)

    It is way better than Woodhenge or Strawhenge.

    --
    "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 15 2019, @09:44PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 15 2019, @09:44PM (#867333)

      But lesser than Weedhenge.

  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday July 16 2019, @03:24AM

    by driverless (4770) on Tuesday July 16 2019, @03:24AM (#867410)

    Another thing, Stonehenge has been repeatedly rebuilt and remodeled over the millennia, most recently in the 1920s [fishki.net] (ignore the conspiracy-theory commentary, just look at the photos). So when they used a "model of Stonehenge", which version was it, given that we have only a vague idea of what it originally looked like?