IImagine the sound a boombox the size of a gymnasium could make, the boom and clang of its music echoing across the mountain peaks.
About 600 years ago, Tupac Yupanqui's Inca order built a stone hall high in the Peruvian Andes in the city of Huitara, located about 10,000 feet above sea level. However, unlike most other Incan buildings, which typically have closed floor plans, this building was completely open at one end. This feature, researchers now say, was likely intended to enhance low-frequency sounds such as the beating of drums that were used to announce the start or end of a battle, bringing music to the ancient world.
“Many people look at Inca architecture and are impressed by the stonework, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Stella Nair, an assistant professor of art history at UCLA who specializes in Native American art and architecture, in her article. statement. “They were also interested in the ephemeral, the temporary and the impermanent, and sound was one of those things.”
According to Nair, a 30-foot-long hole at one end of the temple would concentrate the sound produced inside the hall and project it into the environment more effectively, with greater clarity and coverage, than an enclosed space. Her research shows that this feature was not just an aesthetic whim or a sign of the building's unfinished state, but a feat of acoustic engineering. Since the temple has only three walls, it received the name carp almost in the indigenous language of Quechua, which translates to “tent house.” It is believed that the building served as a sun worship temple or palace.
Ironically, Nair says, the temple most likely survived because the Spanish colonialists ordered a Catholic church to be built on top of it, a common practice in the 16th century.th century The tripartite layout would have made the temple much less stable from an architectural point of view, but the temple still stands today as the foundation of the Church of San Juan Bautista, Waitara's main tourist attraction.
To evaluate the building's sonic properties, Nair is working with a team of acoustics experts led by Stanford University music professor Jonathan Berger. Together, the researchers plan to create a model of how sound might travel through a building and beyond. For her research, Nair photographed, measured the building and made drawings. She will use these drawings in combination with artificial intelligence modeling to try to understand the shape of the original roof, which was removed when the church walls were built.
Nair says her discovery suggests that the ritual and social role of sound should be reconsidered in other pre-Columbian Andean architecture. Her research is part of a growing field of study known as archaeoacousticswhich aims to add a critical level of sound to historical interpretation.
Whatever these acoustic archaeologists discover may tell us a lot about the music that was heard in the valleys and mountains where cultures flourished centuries ago.
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Main photo: Stella Nair
