A Code Discovered or Invented?
Published Wednesday 2nd May, 2007 by Skrik
Their technique involves interpreting the carvings as representative of the patterns produced on Chladni plates. The music sounds fine (.mp3) - contemporary with the period of the carvings, even. But I have my doubts that the music is in fact encoded in the masonry.
Cymatics, the study of waves, didn’t exist before the end of the eighteenth century, when Ernst Chladni published his groundbreaking work with sound tables. Could the masons who carved the chapel have had knowledge of something Chladni is now considered to have pioneered? The crux of the matter is whether or not Chladni plates existed in the late mediæval period, when the chapel was built. If they did, why was knowledge of them lost for a couple of hundred years? If not, however, then why should the carvings signify what we recognise as Chladni patterns? In such a case, the Mitchells’ work would resemble the work of protagonist Oedipa Maas in Pynchon’s novel.
Filed under Humanities, Literature, Weblogging
