Physics does not adequately explain reflected sound and echo effects. Take as example the echo-producing Echoplex, a magnetic tape device that influenced the soundtrack of a generation. Think of Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love (1969) and the echo on its violin sections. The echo coming from Hank Marvin’s guitar shaped the sound of The Shadows in the late 1950s and 1960s.
But are echoes and reverberations a passing feature of musical appreciation, limited to a generation or two? Acoustic research at a rock art site suggests not.
The study site, Kurukop, is in South Africa’s Northern Cape province, in the Nama Karoo region, where the geological formation began to accumulate from about 300 million years ago, before the breakup of the super continent Gondwanaland. This eroded sandstone hill, transformed by volcanic activity, is marked with 112 petroglyphs, or rock engravings. The images depict various figures – eland, elephants, zebra, ostriches, wildebeest, rhinoceros and animal-human hybrids.
