Music Features Prominently in Global Prehistoric Archaeology and Ancient Legends

Steven Waller – wallersj@yahoo.com

Rock Art Acoustics, Lemon Grove, CA, 91945, United States

Popular version of 2aMU6 – Musical Instruments Feature Prominently in Prehistoric Archaeology and Legends of Multiple Cultures
Presented at the 190th ASA Meeting
Read the abstract at https://eppro01.ativ.me/web/planner.php?id=ASASPRING2026

–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–

Put yourself in the place of one of your early Stone Age human ancestors. As you are devouring a bird, you see a hollow bone that the wind could blow through, so you breathe into it. Imagine your surprise when the bone comes alive with the piercing sound of a shrill whistle, and then your further astonishment when an invisible spirit responds from a cave on the other side of the canyon with the exact same whistling.

Early peoples did not understand the wave nature of sound. The complex acoustic principles that cause sound production from musical instruments were totally inexplicable; that goes double for sound repetition in the form of echoes. Examples will be given of ancient myths from cultures around the world describing magic flutes and echo spirits. These attempts to explain mysterious sounds by attributing them to supernatural entities underscore the misperception of such sounds in the past as otherworldly.

Sound producing objects – including flutes, drums, and musical bows – are often depicted in prehistoric paintings and engravings, which are typically situated in acoustically reflective environments such as caves, canyons, and cliff faces. Evidence is accumulating to support the theory that such rock art was motivated by the echoes and reverberation heard in those special acoustic environments. Results of archaeoacoustic studies will be presented relating musical instruments to the content and context of prehistoric art.

Another example of misperception of musical sounds in the distant past pertains to Stonehenge and other megalithic stone circles known by the collective term “Pipers’ Stones”, from an ancient legend of two magical pipers. Experimental data show that sound wave interference patterns from two flutes or bagpipes can cause the auditory illusion of acoustic shadows that seem to be cast from a ring of massive rocks blocking the sound, when in actuality it is merely sound wave cancellation from the two sound sources.

These examples of musical instruments featuring prominently in prehistoric archaeology and in legends of multiple cultures emphasize the importance of considering how the human mind has perceived and interpreted sounds over time, especially when studying archaeological sites.

“The Cave Spoke Back” ebook, a collection of archaeoacoustic publications by Steven J. Waller, can be accessed at https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/zx0sc652ybovt6ijf5nl0/AC2bHC3yQbTvF8lhWj5yhSc?rlkey=6je6s4zmgc9ygqme599q4c40x&st=62vrgw3f&dl=0

What does a glass bottle and an ancient Indian flute have in common? Explorations in acoustic color

Ananya Sen Gupta – ananya-sengupta@uiowa.edu
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
United States

Trevor Smith – trevor-smith@uiowa.edu

Panchajanya Dey – panchajanyadey@gmail.com
@panchajanya_official

Popular version of 5aMU4 – Exploring the acoustic color signature paterns of Bansuri, the traditional Indian bamboo flute using principles of the Helmholtz generator and geometric signal processing techniques
Presented at the 188th ASA Meeting
Read the abstract at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0038290

–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–

The Bansuri, the ancient Indian bamboo flute

 

More media files accessed here

Bansuri, the ancient Indian bamboo flute, is of rich historical, cultural and spiritual significance to South Asian musical heritage. It has been mentioned in ancient Hindu texts dating back centuries, sometimes millennia, and is still played all over India in classical, folk, movie songs, and other musical genres today. Made from a single bamboo reed, with seven finger holes (six are mostly played) and one blow-hole, the Bansuri carries the rich melody of wind whistling through the tropical woods. In terms of musical acoustics, the Bansuri essentially works as a composite Helmholtz resonator, also known as wind throb, with a cylindrical rather than spherical and partially open cavity. The cavity openings are through the finger holes that are open during playing, as well as the open end of the shaft. Helmholtz resonance refers to the phenomenon of air resonance in a cavity, an effect named after the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. The bansuri sound is created when the air going in through the blow-hole is trapped inside the cavity of the bamboo shaft, before it leaves primarily through the end of the bamboo shaft as well as the first open finger holes.

The longer the length of the effective air shaft, which depends on how many finger-holes are closed, the lower the fundamental resonant frequency. However, the acoustical quality of the bansuri is determined not only by the fundamental (lowest) frequency but also by the relative dominance of the harmonics (higher octaves). The different octaves (typical bansuri has a range of thee octaves) can be activated by the bansuri player by controlling the angle and “beam-width” of the blow, which significantly impacts the dynamics of the air pressure, vorticity and air flow. A direct blow into the blow-hole for any finger-hole combination activates the direct propagation mode, where the lowest octave is dominant. To hit the higher octaves of the same note, the flautist has to blow at an angle to activate the other modes of sound propagation, which proceeds through the air column as well as the wooden body of the bansuri.

The accompanying videos and images show a basic demonstration of the bansuri as a musical instrument by Panchajanya Dey, simple demonstrations of a glass bottle as a Helmholtz resonator, and exposition of how the acoustic color (shown in the figures) can be used to bridge interdisciplinary artists to create new forms of music.

Acoustic color is a popular data science tool that expresses the relative distribution of power across the frequency spectrum as a function time. Visually these are images with colormap (red=high, blue = low) representing the relative power between the harmonics of the flute, and a rising (or falling) curve within the acoustic color image indicates a rising (or falling) tone for a harmonic. For the bansuri, the harmonic structures exist as non-linear braid-like curves within the acoustic color image. The higher harmonics, which may contain useful melodic information, are often embedded against background noise that sounds like hiss, likely from mixing of airflow modes and irregular reed vibrations. However, some hiss is natural to the flute and filtering it out makes the music lose its authenticity. In the talk, we presented computational techniques based on harmonic filtering to separate the modes of acoustic propagation and sound production in the Bansuri, e.g. filtering out leakage due to mixing of modes. We also exposited how the geometric aspects of the acoustic color features (e.g. harmonic signatures) may be exploited to create a fluid feature dictionary. The purpose of this dictionary is to store the harmonic signatures of different melodic movements, without sacrificing the rigor of musical grammar, or the authentic earthy sound of the bansuri (e.g. some of the hiss is natural and supposed to be there). This fluid feature repository may be harnessed with large language models (LLM) or similar AI/ML architecture to enable machine interpretation of Indian classical music, create collaborative infrastructure to enable artists from different musical traditions to experiment with an authentic software testbed, among other exciting applications.