: How we brought to life the music of an ancient rock painting #IndiaNEWS Archaeologists spend a lot of time examining the remains of distant pasts, which includes the study of rock paintings. This is

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How we brought to life the music of an ancient rock painting #IndiaNEWS
Archaeologists spend a lot of time examining the remains of distant pasts, which includes the study of rock paintings. This is largely visual work – but sometimes we can “hear� the ancient past using acoustic methods.Our archaeoacoustic research is focused on bringing to life sounds made by people living in the past. No aural record remains but people did dance, sing and clap. Instruments either no longer exist or are extremely rare. One exception are the gong rocks, known as lithophones, which ring when struck and produce purposeful, percussive sounds. Occasionally, unfamiliar and rare musical instruments are depicted in rock paintings.In a new study, we turned our ears to a rock painting in the Cederberg Mountains in South Africa’s Western Cape province. The human figures in this painting have previously been interpreted as healers holding fly-whisks and doing a trance-dance. Fly-whisks were an important accessory for the dance because they were thought to keep arrows of sickness at bay.But our results suggest that the fly-whisks are in fact musical instruments of a type known as a !goin !goin – a name that only exists in the now-extinct ǀXam language that was spoken by hunter-gatherers in central southern Africa. The !goin !goin is an aerophone – these instruments produce sound by creating vibrations...Read more

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