Month: August 2015

Horse Skull Disco

[Image: Horse skull via Wikimedia].

If you’re looking to install a new sound system in your house, consider burying a horse skull in the floor.

According to the Irish Archaeological Consultancy, the widespread discovery of “buried horse skulls within medieval and early modern clay floors” has led to the speculation that they might have been placed there for acoustic reasons—in other words, “skulls were placed under floors to create an echo,” we read.

Ethnographic data from Ireland, Britain and Southern Scandinavia attests to this practice in relation to floors that were in use for dancing. The voids within the skull cavities would have produced a particular sound underfoot. The acoustic skulls were also placed in churches, houses and, in Scandinavia especially, in threshing-barns… It was considered important that the sound of threshing carried far across the land.

They were osteological subwoofers, bringing the bass to medieval villages.

It’s hard to believe, but this was apparently a common practice: “the retrieval of horse skulls from clay floors, beneath flagstones and within niches in house foundations, is a reasonably widespread phenomenon. This practice is well attested on a wider European scale,” as well, even though the ultimate explanation for its occurrence is still open to debate (the Irish Archaeological Consultancy post describes other interpretations, as well).

Either way, it’s interesting to wonder if the thanato-acoustic use of horse skulls as resonating gourds in medieval architectural design might have any implications for how natural history museums could reimagine their own internal sound profiles—that is, if the vastly increased reverberation space presented by skulls and animal skeletons could be deliberately cultivated to affect what a museum’s interior sounds like.

[Image: Inside the Paris Natural History Museum; photo by Nicola Twilley].

Like David Byrne’s well-known project Playing the Building—”a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument”—you could subtly instrumentalize the bones on display for the world’s most macabre architectural acoustics.

(Via @d_a_salas. Previously on BLDGBLOG: Terrestrial Sonar).

Full-Spectrum Mandala

[Image: Via the Pacific Cold War Patrol Museum].

Somewhat randomly—though I suppose I have a thing for antennas—I came across a blog post looking at the layout of Circularly Disposed Antenna Arrays.

A Circularly Disposed Antenna Array, he explains, was “sometimes referred to as a Circularly Disposed Dipole Array (CDDA)” and was “used for radio direction finding. The military used these to triangulate radio signals for radio navigation, intelligence gathering and search and rescue.”

[Image: Via the Pacific Cold War Patrol Museum].

While discussing the now-overgrown landscapes found on old military sites in Hawaii, the post’s author points out the remains of old antenna set-ups still visible in the terrain.

A series of photos, that you can find over at the original post, show how these abandoned circular land forms—like electromagnetic stone circles—exist just below the surface of the Hawaiian landscape, thanks to the archipelago’s intense militarization over the course of the 20th century.

He then cleverly juxtaposes these madala-like technical diagrams with what he calls a “Polynesian guidance system for navigating the Pacific” (bringing to mind our earlier look at large-scale weather systems in the South Pacific and how they might have guided human settlement there).

[Image: Via the Pacific Cold War Patrol Museum].

The idea that Polynesian shell map geometries and the antenna designs of Cold War-era military radio sites might inadvertently echo one another is hugely evocative, albeit purely a poetic analogy.

Finally, I couldn’t resist this brief passage, describing many of these ruined antenna sites: “Their exact Cold War era use, frequencies and purpose isn’t yet known but were most likely for aircraft radio navigation, direction finding, intelligence gathering and for search and rescue.”

You can all but picture the opening shots of a film here, as concerned military radio operators, surrounded by the arcane, talismanic geometries of antenna structures in the fading light of a Pacific summer evening, pick up the sounds of something vast and strange moving at the bottom of the sea.