Science Friday
Hosted by Flora Lichtman
What did a vulture-bone flute sound like inside a cave? How about singing inside a tomb? Researchers are bringing ancient sounds back to life.
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Hey, I'm Flora Lichtman, and you're listening to Science Friday.
That sound of a choir performing in a cathedral is iconic for a reason. It's a beautiful human experience, being side by side with other people, feeling the sound vibrate through you, reverberating around the space.
But how long has that been a part of human culture? And when we look back at ancient humans during the Ice and Stone Age times, what role did sound play in their lives? That's the focus of a growing field of archaeology called archaeoaustics, where researchers use the scientific tools of today to investigate the role of sound and music in the past. Joining us now to talk about it are my guests, Dr. Margarita Diaz-Andro, professor at the University of Barcelona, Spain, and principal investigator of the Art Soundscapes project, and Dr. Rupert Till, professor of music and head of the Department of Humanities at the University of Huddersfield in the UK. I want to welcome you both to Science Friday.
Hi. Hello.
Marga, you're an archaeologist. You study rock art. How does sound come into it?
Yes, I am an archaeologist, and archaeologists usually don't deal with sound. I came to it through an interest in the material. I had been studying color in the landscape and the location of sites. I had also been looking at other issues that usually archaeologists don't pay much attention to.
Like what? Give me an example.
Like things that are disregarded. Archaeologists usually look at typologies, the form of objects, and chronology, and I wanted to go a bit beyond that, sort of more the human aspect of archaeology and the emotional aspect of archaeology. There are other archaeologists who are dealing with issues with taste and also touch, but in my case, I started with color and then I moved into sound.
And I just entered this field by chance. I heard someone who was talking, giving a talk about this. It was Steve Waller. And I thought, you know, I'm going to try. And I was completely skeptical about the possibility of finding positive results. And I was so surprised when I then looked at how rock at sites in that particular landscape coincided with areas with higher reverberation in the valley in which I was analyzing.
Um, okay. So you were skeptical that acoustics could play any role in this visual art. And then you looked and studied these sites and found that they have special acoustic properties.
Yes, exactly.
I want to get into that a little bit more deeply. But first, Rupert, you're a musicologist and a musician. How did you get involved in archaeology?
Well, also kind of by accident, I kind of stumbled into it. I had some very close friends who are archaeologists. I moved into a house next to archaeologists and they're a very sociable bunch. One of them ended up as my lodger. And he was, he was working at Stonehenge on this incredible 10 year dig. Um, and I guess I realized, because I'd studied acoustics at university, I realized that there was more to the story than they realized.
Careful, because Marga's on the line here.
Well, she said the same thing, you know, that it was a field that was, that had some very spurious research in it. And that had as many people from the kind of mind, body, spirit, crystal healing kind of world interested in it. That there was lots to be skeptical about. But I kind of realized that that sound and music and acoustics could offer more to help fill in a little piece of the jigsaw for archaeologists.
That it could be tested, that it doesn't, that there's, that science could be applied to these questions. It sounds like you realized.
Well, I, I, I think most of my archaeologist friends spent time looking at a ditch or a wall or as an individual's stone. And they had a very good understanding of the materials of what were there. Whereas music's. It animates things. It's a time-based medium. So it helps in give you an idea of what it might have felt like to be in a space by having a better understanding of what the acoustics are like and what music or sound was like in a space.
Mark, so how do you do this work? How do you test this hypothesis that acoustics were important in the ancient world? And Rupert, I want to hear from you too on this.
Yeah, so the way is testing rock art sites and testing places without rock art. So what we want to see is a pattern and looking at different acoustic properties. So throughout the years, we started working with sound engineers. So you can look at reverberation. You can also check whether there are echoes or not.
And very important also, speech clarity and music clarity. And by comparing rock art sites with sites without rock art, places where that have been special for people. So the question was, is this related to a special acoustics of some sort? And the answer has been varied. There are no universal laws in the type of acoustics that people were searching in these fantastic rock art sites. In some cases, we have found that there was a bit of reverberation and some others,
speech clarity in some other echoes. So it depends. Every culture has been using a different way of relating to acoustics. And in some other places, we haven't obtained positive results.
Rupert, let's get into a specific example. Tell me about this vulture bone flute and who used it and where it was found.
Yeah, so the oldest musical instrument that we're certain about that has been discovered by archaeologists is in caves in Spain and France. So there's a very ancient one in Holofels Cave in Germany, which is 43,000 years old.
Forty-three thousand years old.
Yeah. So around that time, there's a kind of explosion of creative activity. People in Europe burying people for the first time and art objects being found, little carvings and paintings appearing on walls. And also flutes, musical instruments, they're really a pipe. It's more like a shakuhachi from Japan or a nay from Egypt or Turkey. It's like a tube of bone. And one of the biggest bones in Europe at the time was that of a vulture bone. Like, if you've ever seen The Jungle Book and you've seen the vultures, they're like that with a big hook nose, these huge birds.
We covered them on the show recently because an ancient sandal was found in one of the, you know, old nests from, in Spain.
Well, they're
Keep going.
They're very important creatures. I mean, they're found in the oldest cities, painted on walls. And you go to Zoroastria in the Far East and they're used to deflesh bodies and take the bodies off to the mountains. And they're quite significant figures in human culture over the years, but they're big enough that if you get hold of their wing, because they're birds, their bones are hollow, their wing bones are hollow so they can fly. So if you cut the two ends off, you're left with a tube of wood. And if you make little holes along it, you've got basically a fairly simple pipe that you can play amazing music on.
And so these were found about 43,000 years ago in Germany and then 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. They're also found in France in a beautiful cave called Isturitz. And the same bones are being used to make these amazing instruments.
Before you go on, because I know there's more to this story, we have a little clip of just the flute being played. You know, maybe you can tell us if it's in a lab or where it is, but let's hear it.
The first time I heard these things, it was like, it was an archaeologist who wasn't a musician, wasn't trained as a musician. They're playing it like a 12-year-old recorder player, you know, at school, quite simply, because it's not easy, there's no, they're quite difficult to play. And it was in a lecture hall or classroom, so it was that acoustic. And that's the recording, that recording's played by an archaeologist who will remain anonymous, who's, who, you know, is a reasonable player. But I kind of thought, well, I want to hear what this sounds like if it's played in the cave it was made in and by a brilliant flute player. I mean, the one you're hearing has been made from an actual vulture bone. You have to get permission, ecological permission, because
they're protected species. You have to get one from a zoo or something. It's an archaeologically rigorous replica of the original. But I managed to work with Anna Friedrich Potongowski, who's used to be in the Berliner Ensemble, who's a German flute player who became fascinated with these instruments. And she just had a different level of facility on the instrument. So we went to France with the Isthrits flute and played the Isthrits flute in the Isthrits cave, where these things were made for about 10,000 years, and they found 30 of them. Imagine a tradition of making a musical instrument in the same place for 10,000 years. I mean, it's, it's pretty unique.
Amazing. Okay, we have a recording of this flute being played in the cave where it was found. Let's hear it.
It's just a completely different experience when you when you hear the reverberation, the sound seems to fly away more like a bird.
Were you there for that recording?
Yeah.
Did you make that recording?
I made the recording and we captured in much the way Margarita describes it. We captured the acoustic. We used this as swept sine wave, which stimulates all the frequencies in the cave. And we captured the acoustic as well. But yeah, I was there with five microphones capturing it in 5.1 surround so that I could then, you know, let people hear this amazing sound because most people don't get to hear it.
I think it's like reaching back in time. A lot of the contexts where we look at these instruments are kind of ritual contexts in places of great meaning because we know that caves were associated with other other the experiences.
Rupert, how often would people 20,000 years ago even hear reverberations like this? Like, how common of an experience would that be?
Yeah, I mean, nowadays, we used, you know, you go to the bathroom, you get some reverberation, you get some echo, you go to a church or a concert hall, we're just used to it. There are no bathrooms in prehistory, there are no concert halls, there are no buildings, you know, there's nowhere where you can hear reverberation like that, except perhaps in caves. I mean, in Margarita's work, you hear the echoes, which is another echoes are another thing altogether from the top of mountains. And they're also special places. So these caves were pretty special, magical places where people went into and interacted with the acoustic presence.
Okay, we have to take a quick break, but don't go away because we have more ancient soundscapes to explore. We have front row seats to a concert in an ancient tomb in Malta. I promise you will want to hear it.
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You know, I work in audio, so I care about acoustics. But I think in general, most people don't think too hard about acoustics, or at least I think this every time I'm in a noisy restaurant, where I'm like, just throw something on the ceiling. What draws you both to this particular corner of the sensory world?
I think that we usually think about the past, and of course archaeologists have been doing this, they think about the past in a silent way. And no, the past was full of sounds, sounds that were nice to hear and sounds that were not. So I think that what we are trying to do here is to make the past more human, to give it more of a human layer that archaeologists had not taken into account.
For me, I'm wanting to reach back into the past and try and recreate artistically what it might have sounded like and what the experience of being in some of these spaces may have been like. And now we're using VR and sort of computer game technology to try and do that. If we can reach back, reconstruct what the sound environments of the past was like, and if there is something in that that resonates with us that's similar to our sonic cultures today, then that suggests that's a cultural element of humanity that's lasted for tens of thousands of years. And I think that speaks into what it means fundamentally to be human.
Let's wrap up with this recording. You have Rupert from a tomb in Malta. Just give us a little bit of the story about where it's from.
Actually, I think Margarita and I were both in this space. It's a rock cut tomb which was carved into the ground by hand with antle picks, but it's huge. It's 30 meters across with two levels and it was full of bones. It was a place people left their ancestors when they died. But it has like a 30 second reverberation time. Acoustically, it's astonishing. And this is Yegor Resnikov, one of the first people to do research in acoustics and archaeology, playing this tomb as if it's an instrument, identifying the resonances and then singing into them.
Let's hear it.
Fantastic, isn't it?
It is fantastic. What would people be doing in that tomb? What sounds might they be making?
I guess that in the same way that Igor was using sort of lower pitches to create this type of reverberation, this is a sound that makes us feel calm and that makes us feel sort of in connection with the other world.
Yeah, I mean, as I understand it, the space was full of bones and they weren't all kept together in skeletons laid out neatly. They were kind of piled up. So people would have gone there to place their dead relatives there and they may have been sort of mourning. But I think more, they'd have gone to visit generations and generations and generations of ancestors who were there to speak to them, to ask for their wisdoms, to consult them. So I totally agree with Margarita that they'd have been reaching out for connection to other planes of existence, to connect themselves to something else.
Which is exactly what you two are doing.
I think so. That's, I feel we're kind of trying to reach back into time to understand those who came before us in the same way that they did when they went to that tomb.
Thank you both for joining me today.
Thank you.
Yeah, thanks. Great to be here.
Dr. Margarita Diaz-Andro, Principal Investigator of the Art Soundscapes Project and Professor at the University of Barcelona, Spain. And Dr. Rupert Till, Professor at the University of Huddersfield in England.
This episode was produced by Dee Peterschmidt. Thank you for tuning in today and every day, and we will see you next week.
Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated