Researcher: Stonehenge Built for Sound Effects

(EndPlay Staff Reports) - A researcher has announced a new theory about the arrangements of Stonehenge.

The theory is that the creators of Stonehenge arranged the rock monument so that the placement of the rocks would create a sort of a sound illusion.

The illusion, archaeoacoustic expert Steven Waller told the American Association for the Advancement of Science , is called an interference pattern. As two pipers would both play, the sound waves of each player would cancel each other out at certain spots around them. It gives the idea, though, that something physical is blocking the sound.

To test his theory he had two flute players play at Stonehenge. He walked around them to feel the experience.

"The impression I got when I walked into these quiet zones was the experience of being sheltered by the sound from some object that was blocking the sound," he said at the AAAS annual meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

Waller said that, as people would have danced around Stonehenge, to pipers or flutists or whatever musicians were there, they would experience these loud and soft regions and feel as though there were massive objects in the ring.

"It would have been this complete baffling experience," he said. "Anything experienced like that in the past was considered to be magic. It was like a vision they received from another world."

He also tested his theory by having three blindfolded people move in a circle around the monument and listen to a pair of pipes playing the same note.

He told the AAAS that they then drew what they thought was responsible for blocking the sound, and the structures they drew were similar to Stonehenge's layout.

Waller's theory, The UK Telegraph pointed out, would be a departure from popular belief that the pillars of Stonehenge are arranged in relations to the positioning of the sun at the equinoxes.

LiveScience reported that Waller, in pushing his theory, also referred to Stonehenge myths that link it with music. For example, in Great Britain the traditional nickname for stone circles is "piper stones."

Waller's research is not only about Stonehenge. He is hopeful that his findings will highlight how important sound is to archeology.