A gramophone gets music or the spoken word back from incised grooves in a disk. The grooves were made by vibrations laid down as sound in matter. Is it possible that Nature left its imprint in matter such as rock and metals (e.g. coins) that could be retrieved as sound from the past? For example, battles, impact of meteors and asteroids in the K/T boundary, 66 million years ago?
Jan,
The idea is not particularly new:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoacoustics
(halfway down: Daedalus' most excellent column in NS mentioned it)
But there's a distinct lack of suitable stylii in nature which can be made to rest with ease on a plastic surface, and yet transmit acoustic signatures faithfully.
A reed draped over a rapidly-drying mud flow, which meanders along while volcanoes erupt?
Well - perhaps - but finding such a scenario seems unlikely.
Dear Jan,
I got the same idea a s;ix years ago and like you I posted as a RG question:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Does_Sound_Fossil_Exist
Does Sound Fossil Exist?
In the mid nineteen century a number of acoustical mechanical recording process were invented. The sound of the performers was captured by a diaphragm with the cutting needle connected to it. The needle made the groove in the recording medium. Maybe such acoustical mechanical recording process might naturally exist in Nature and have created sound fossils that it up to us to discover. Did have such process and sound fossils been discovered? Could you imagine such process?
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I did not find an answer to the question so far.
Regards,
- Louis
Dear James and Louis, I know about Wikipedia's text concerning music, Stonehenge and Mexico's pyramid with contributions from 1998-2017. I was more concerned with the enormous noise of an incoming meteor or an asteroid because if this did not leave a measurable soundtrack behind, what do we expect from music and battle noises? So, the question is still up-to-date, I suppose.
Dear Jan,
Enormous meteor crashes leaves a lot of traces, gigantic craters in the earth crust that become lakes or depression at the bottom of the oceans, or rich deposits of rare minerals, or strata of certain rare substances in rocks throuhout the world. Plenty of such traces. The possibility of traces in term of recording of sound are there but these events in terms of sound are very brief and so if we assume that some recordings exist, then they also exist for all other sound events which are ten order of magnitude more numerous and so it would be a tremendous hay stack sorting to find these specific recordings.
Regards,
- Louis
I made music from the ratio of crop circle areas or diameters (they corresponded into music notes). Who ever created this phenomenon expected it to be explained by its music. It was very interesting music, but I could not go further in interpreting it.
Dear Michael,
There a coincidence like:
The coordinates of the Great Pyramid of Giza is 29.9792458°N and the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second. Should we try to figure out a reason behind this coincidence? Is there a mystery there? Only a coincidence .