by Robert Evans
The Maryhill monument is still a lovely gesture, and, appropriately enough, Sam Hill himself is buried there. I’m grateful to him, because this monument’s existence gave me the opportunity to test just how good an amp Stonehenge might’ve been.
The Science of a Stone Age Discotheque
The Maryhill monument is made out of concrete, not bluestone or any other kind of natural rock. But the original builders took great care to give it a texture as close to the actual ’Henge as possible. Dr. Fazenda’s team from the University of Salford chose to do their groundbreaking work on Stonehenge’s acoustics there, because the difference in sound between Hill’s monument and the real thing was negligible.
Their research found that the level of sound reverberation at the Maryhill Stonehenge was in line with what you’d expect from a competently constructed contemporary lecture hall. The study found an increase in acoustic activity that had a notable effect on speech as well as chanting. And while any large, circular room is bound to have some sort of reverberatory properties, the unique construction of the original Stonehenge is more complex than that.
The colored-in stones represent the fullest original configuration of Stonehenge, before time and tourists fucked it up. Fortunately, the Maryhill monument is built as a replica of the full, original ’Henge. Tavia Morra
Those interstitial rings of stone have a big impact on the overall acoustics, refracting and diffusing sound waves. According to the University of Salford’s report, that means “sound waves at any point in the space are likely to be traveling in many directions rather than from a specific direction.”
This actually prevents the formation of echoes, and causes sound to reverberate in such a way that it tends to be equally audible anywhere within the circle. But I wasn’t interested in some kind of fancy Stone Age podium. The news articles I’d read about Dr. Fazenda’s work at Stonehenge had all had titles like:
“Stonehenge Was an Ancient Rave Spot” (Discovery News, 2013)
“Stonehenge: One Totally Awesome Rave Location” (NBC News, 2009)
Dr. Fazenda’s own 2012 article on the subject, “Acoustics of Stonehenge,” University of Salford, was super informative but very dry—lots of math, not even one use of the word rave or the phrase totally awesome. But then I came across some interviews with Dr. Rupert Till, the musical archaeologist who’d helped Dr. Fazenda conduct tests on the Maryhill monument.
He painted a much more vivid picture, comparing the likely musical style of the Stonehenge builders to samba music: fast paced, with large bands and hundreds of participants. Dr. Till himself even compared the scene to a rave in “Songs of the Stones,” a 2010 paper in the Journal of the Independent Association for the Study of Popular Music. He stated that the acoustics of Stonehenge implied a “large number of people” gathering to play “amplified, simple, rhythmic repetitive music” to achieve a “trance-like state.” Dr. Till continued:
Similar activities are present at “rave” events within Electronic Dance Music Culture . . . which has been described by many commentators as having ritualistic or religious meaning for its participants.
If Dr. Till is correct, modern raves and music festivals aren’t some sign of modern decadence ushered in by the hippie era. Rather, they’re a very old piece of human culture reasserting itself after a long dormancy. But what does he mean by “trance-like state”?
The Weird Science of Mind-Altering Beats
Every drum has a natural resonant frequency. If you beat the drum at a particular tempo, it’ll produce louder, clearer notes. Spaces, like concert halls and auditoriums, have a resonant frequency, too. And if you match that frequency you can cause the space to resonate, producing a hum not unlike running your finger along the rim of a very large glass.
Doctors Till and Fazenda estimated Stonehenge’s resonant frequency at around 10 Hz. Hertz, or Hz, is a science-talk way of measuring the number of counts per second of sound. Ten hertz is between 150 and 160 beats per minute (BPM). So the theory is that enough ancients playing loudly enough at a steady 150 BPM pace would’ve caused the whole ’Henge to hum like an enormous Tibetan prayer bowl.
So how does a loud hum bring us to tranced-out Stone Age raves? The answer is brainwave entrainment: the use of certain frequencies to induce specific states of mind. Thoughts and feelings are measured as brainwaves. Different states of mind tend to correspond to different frequencies of brainwaves. For example, sleeping is associated with theta brainwaves, between 4 and 7 Hz. The brain of a relaxed or meditating person tends to be full of alpha brainwaves, between 8 and 14 Hz.
You’ll notice 10 Hz is smack-dab in the middle of that alpha brainwave range. Dr. Till’s theory is that enough drummers, keeping that perfect frequency, would’ve caused a 10 Hz hum powerful enough to entrain the brains of a large number of listeners. Dr. Till stopped short of calling Stonehenge an ancient mind-control device . . . but that’s basically what it was.
At some point, the rocks of Stonehenge were even modified to amplify this acoustic effect. Dr. Till notes that the walls are “curved and polished, purposefully shaped.The inner stones are concave, but the outer stones are not . . . presumably for acoustic effect.”
You can test the effect of brainwave entrainment on yourself by downloading some “binaural beats.” These are often described as “sounds that get you high!” by people on the Internet. In technical terms, a binaural beat is created by playing sounds in each ear of differing frequency. The two beats “entrain” the brain, causing it to vibrate at a frequency equal to the difference between both beats. So a 410 Hz beat in one ear and a 400 Hz beat in the other would entrain your brain to a 10 Hz alpha brainwave state.
Note that you will not get fucked-up on binaural beats. You might notice a mild relaxation effect from listening to a beat designed to sink you into an alpha state, or slight agitation from a higher-hertz beat designed to amp you up to a beta brainwave. The ability of binaural beats to alter human consciousness is highly debated. An exhaustive clinical review of twenty studies conducted by Drs. Tina Huang and Christine Charyton (funded by the Transparent Corporation, a brainwave entrainment software company) suggests that brainwave entrainment can be used to relieve headaches and stress, and even to provide relief from PMS. But more recent research conducted by Patrick McConnell and Brett Froeliger (et al) for a 2014 article in Frontiers in Psychology (“Auditory Driving of the Autonomic Nervous System”) saw “no observable” physiological changes in subjects. Although those subjects did report feeling vaguely better and more relaxed.
So the jury is still very much out on binaural beats. For my own part, I can assure you that all those claims of sounds that simulate drug trips are wildly exaggerated. You can go Googling around to test it for yourself, but if you’re looking for aurally induced acid, you’ll be disappointed.
That said, the use of rhythm as a pain reliever is quite well documented. And you don’t need to listen to any weird computer-generated tones, either. If you’re ever in severe pain, with no meds in sight, pop on one of your favorite songs instead and start singing along.
Research published by Bernatzky Goetze in the 2011 paper “Emotional Foundations of Music as a Non-pharmacological Pain Management Tool in Modern Medicine” suggests that music has an impact on the brain’s opioid receptors, which may help reduce the sensation of pain and amount of pain medication needed by a patient. This paper also suggests that most scientists are terrible at developing clickable titles.
In cases in which the use of painkillers in surgery is considered too dangerous for the patient, music is often used to take the edge off. I once interviewed a man who had only Mozart to comfort him through open-heart surgery; his health issues were severe enough that his doctors couldn’t risk any kind of anesthetic. He said the music helped—although he’d have much preferred an IV full of opiates.
Interestingly enough, while playing a patient’s favorite music
tends to work best, music chosen by another person can also work. Sometimes it’s even more effective, which suggests that rhythm may have some beneficial health effect whether or not it’s music you particularly enjoy.
Of course, the people who built Stonehenge didn’t even have the wheel. It seems almost absurd to imagine them knowing enough about acoustics to build a giant mind-control amp. And the truth is that while we can test the acoustics of Stonehenge and say, “Yes, this setup can amplify sound,” we can’t know that the ancients built it with that purpose in mind.
Today, everyone reading this is beset by hundreds of man-made sounds, some barely audible, every second of every day. We’ve gotten very good at tuning them out and focusing only on the sounds we care about. Ancient humans lived in a world with few man-made sounds.
It’s significant that we’ve been building musical instruments more than twice as long as we’ve been brewing alcohol. In The Origins of Music, published in 1999, Walter Freeman of Berkeley University suggested that humans might have been making music longer than we’ve been starting fires. In an age before drugs, before cities, before any other comforts existed, the dopamine high of listening to really good music was one of the most intense experiences people could make for themselves.
So maybe the builders of Stonehenge would’ve had enough musical know-how to, at the very least, recognize the acoustic powers of the structure they were building and modify it to work even better.
And how well did it work? I had to find out.
HOW TO: Re-create a Stone Age Rave
The Maryhill Stonehenge monument is open to the public. Anyone with a few hundred bucks can reserve it for a private gathering, and anyone with zero bucks can still show up with a twenty-person samba band and start doing some science. I was in that latter group.
My friend Brandon played in sambAmore, a drums-and-horns samba ensemble based out of Arcata, California. He and the band were touring in Washington in June 2015 and I was able to convince them to take a four-hour detour to Maryhill to help me test the Ravehenge theory.
Before we left I started emailing with Dr. Rupert Till, who had conducted the original study. He advised us to have drummers standing inside the outer ring of stones, their backs to the outer stones, facing toward the center. He also guessed that we’d need “200 ideally” to make it work. sambAmore has only twenty members, and not all of them play drums.
We gave it a try anyway, and started with the band’s ten drummers spaced out evenly across one side of the ’Henge, facing toward the center.
They started at a middling volume and 156 beats per minute. I stood directly south of the band, facing them, about even with the big concrete slab in the center. The hum became evident within twenty or thirty seconds, and it seemed to grow louder with time. It was almost like the drone of a didgeridoo.
Matt Black
My cameraman, Matt, stood on the far side of the ’Henge from me, inside one of the inner trilithons. In his video of the event, the hum isn’t really evident until the first minute in, and it gets its loudest around two minutes in. Watching the videos makes it clear just how big a difference the listener’s position has on the effect: The band sounded substantially larger where I was standing, even though Matt was closer.
After a few minutes, we decided to split the band: Half of them would increase their volume and continue drumming, while the other half would join me in the center and listen for the hum. The drummers started up again, and the hum returned. It was an exciting moment, and musicians started scrambling around the ’Henge listening for changes in the hum.
Matt Black
It didn’t take long for the musicians of sambAmore to start playing with Stonehenge like it was a giant new drum powered by other drums. Brandon hit on the idea of having four drummers with big Brazilian surdos play while walking counterclockwise just inside the outer wall of the structure.
Within a minute or so the drummers drew even with the trilithons on the opposite side. A band member standing under the tallest of the inner trilithons called everyone over, shouting, “Hold it, hold it, don’t move!” to the band and then, “Walk over here!” to everyone else.
A chorus of ohs, ahhhs, and holy fucks followed for the next minute or so; the area immediately in front of, and behind the largest trilithon, pictured here . . .
Matt Black
. . . was definitely the best seat in the house. Standing under the center of the trilithon, or directly in front of it, the reverb was so intense it sounded almost like being on the inside of a gong.
Depending on where you stood, the hum took from a few seconds to a whole minute to grow clearly audible. At one point, we placed each of the four surdo drummers on opposing quarters of the ’Henge, facing inward. It took between ten and fifteen seconds for the hum to grow audible again. From my position in the center, by the altar, the drone had a deeper, more bass-y, sound.
The most important takeaway here is that Stonehenge’s unique acoustic properties would’ve been
1. immediately obvious to the musicians playing inside it; and
2. highly malleable.
In the space of two hours, the musicians of sambAmore found several different ways to alter the pitch and tone of the Stonehenge hum. Perhaps Stonehenge’s thousand years of construction were akin to a tuning process, experimenting with different stone shapes and configurations, continually testing the quality of the sound produced and slowly dialing in on the ideal shape to produce the best acoustic effect.
The results of this experiment seem pretty damn conclusive to me, at least as far as saying, “Yes, Stonehenge has acoustic properties that would’ve been immediately obvious to ancient musicians.” Not just the hum, but also the natural resonant properties of the stone circles made music played within the ’Henge sound louder and richer. It was almost like being inside a tiny opera house.
But what about all that brainwave entrainment stuff? The drumming and hum of the ’Henge were right at 10 Hz. I can’t say I noticed my own brain falling into a trance-like state. None of the musicians reported anything like that, either. (I think we were all too excited playing with Stonehenge to attempt meditation.) Perhaps with an even larger band the sound would’ve been truly mind altering.
There was a certain giddiness, however, among the band and the observers when we started figuring out how to manipulate the hum. It was exciting to hear stone and concrete sing. Perhaps, to the musicians of a quieter and lonelier age, the hum of Stonehenge would’ve sounded like the earth itself was playing with them.
The genesis of this chapter came when I was standing in line at Ralphs, the grocery store nearest to my former home in Los Angeles. As with almost every large store, grocery and otherwise, the lane leading up to the cashier was lined with candy and soda on one side, and eye-catching copies of Us, GQ, People, and even less savory fare, like the National Enquirer, on the other. Every one of these periodicals sells itself with the same basic tactic: celebrity faces, and juicy stories about their ridiculous lives. My artist mocked up a representative sample, in case you live in some isolated jungle tribe and stumbled upon this book in the wreckage of a plane crash.
Congratulations on somehow learning English!
Depending on your perspective, these magazines are either a symbol of our modern degeneracy or a chance to exclaim, “Holy shit, did you see Jennifer Aniston’s baby bump?” Even if you hate celebrity culture, you can’t deny that those famous faces have a magnetic pull on the brains of billions of people. That’s not hyperbole, by the way, nor did I drop Jen Aniston’s name at random.
Back in the late oughts a neuroscientist named Itzhak Fried was fiddling about in the brains of people with severe epilepsy, as neuroscientists are wont to do. Brain surgery is often performed while the patient is conscious. And since his patients were awake, their brains as exposed as an exhibitionist on a crowded bus, Dr. Fried decided to tr
y an experiment. He showed a subject a series of seemingly random images: animals, strangers, and even a few celebrities. At one point a picture of Ms. Aniston popped up, and Dr. Fried watched a neuron in the medial temporal lobe fire.
He tried it on other patients and saw the exact same result. For some reason, every brain he studied had a special reaction to Jennifer Aniston. Seeing other people didn’t set off the neuron, but seeing different celebrities did set off different neurons in some of the patients. Each of those celebrity neurons was actually just the tip of a memory iceberg, buried deep within each patient’s brain, consisting of uncounted thousands of neurons.
I’d love to give you some sort of fascinating and enlightening reason why, but we just don’t know yet. Some neuroscientists, like Dr. Fried, suspect that those deeply buried stacks of neurons hold all our memories and recollections of a person. The Big Boss Neuron on top acts sort of like an intruder alarm, letting the brain’s Aniston Archives know it’s time to fire up, because she’s been spotted.
Other neuroscientists disagree. But whatever the reason behind it, there’s no doubt that something in our brains is hardwired to react differently to famous people. The fact that we’ve never met Ms. Aniston doesn’t matter; your gray matter knows she’s important for some reason, and now it’s on the lookout for her wherever you go.
This fact leads me to an uncomfortable truth about the human condition. As comforting as it is to blame our obsession with celebrities on the Internet and mass media, it in fact comes from a much deeper, older place. And if you aren’t afraid to swallow your pride and admit that we are, in fact, hardwired to give some fraction of a fuck what Donald Trump has to say, I’ll do my best to take you back to where this all started . . .