Stonehenge (G-B): The 'singing' stones

Source - http://www.somersetguardian.co.uk/singing-stones-Stonehenge/story-20750831-detail/story.html

It has long been a mystery to even the most learned expert of the Stonehenge monument – what is so special about the stone in west Wales that it was worth carting 180 miles to Salisbury Plain?

Most theories concentrated on how the famous bluestones of the Preseli hills in Pembrokeshire can be buffed up to a strikingly polished shine. But now experts in the arts, rather than archaeology, have come up with a different theory – and it is not to do with how they look, but how the sound.

Researchers from the Royal College of Art in London spent months taking one lump of stone and tapping it on more than 1,000 rocks in the Carn Menyn area of the Preseli hills, and discovered something so remarkable it may well rewrite the history books about Stonehenge.

The bluestones ‘sing’ when they are hit, resonating with an apparently unique twang that does not appear to reach the same pitch or musical note as other stones which merely ‘thud’.

Some previous theories surrounding Stonehenge’s sonic qualities – the way the stone circle would have captured and reverberated sound – had been rather dismissed by the experts concentrating on astronomy and landscape, but the new study appears to reinforce the importance of sound, and the sonic qualities of the stones themselves.

“We found it was a noteworthy soundscape, with a significant percentage of the actual rocks making metallic sounds like bells, gongs, tin drums, etc, when tapped with small, handheld ‘hammerstones’,” said Paul Devereux, the study’s co-leader, a research associate at the college and an expert in archaeo-acoustics.

It is a phenomenon anyone sitting inside the stone circle during the summer solstice celebrations each year amid the cacophony of a dozen or so drummers can attest to.

“The stones may have been thought to have magical, qualities, mana, because of their exceptional sonic nature,” he added.

A spokesman for the project said it was merely a pilot study – the phenomenon of the ‘sound of stone’ is being investigated for virtually the first time with the project itself.

“The project is a pilot study of raw visual and acoustic elements mainly on and around the Carn Menyn ridge, Mynydd Preseli, south-west Wales, the source area of some of the Stonehenge bluestones, an area still relatively untouched by modern development,” he said. “Sites in the surrounding Pembrokeshire countryside were also briefly visited. The project asked: ‘What might Stone Age eyes and ears have perceived in this landscape, and what aspects made it become important to the builders of Stonehenge?’”

Last summer’s work also saw researchers comb the Preseli Hills and identify tell-tale signs in the stones that pinpointed the actual hill which provided the source for the bluestones.