The Ancient Orchestra | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

So the first thing I want to do here, Amy, is just play you something. Okay? Out of the blue. [Music] Okay, so that is not Chewbacca, right? No? Just okay, let's clear that up right now. You like the oldies, right? Yeah, but not that old. All these people think like 1950s, and no way that that is 1950s. Well, actually it is from the 50s, just not the century you're thinking of. Okay, which century? The 1850s. That's in the 1850s. Okay, so this is... that's before Edison. Was that like one of those wax cylinder things? Edison was the inventor of the wax cylinder. Okay, and for a long time, people thought, "Oh, Edison is the guy who invented recorded sound."

Wait, wait, wait. Is this one of those cases where Edison has taken credit for somebody else's invention, or did someone else just get there before him and nobody knew about it? Someone got there before him and nobody knew about it, including the guy who invented it. [Music] Wait, what did he think he was doing then? So, 20 years before Edison invented the phonograph, there's this guy in France, his name's Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. Okay, he made a thing that he thought kind of looked like a human eardrum, and to the middle of this eardrum, he attached a boar's hair, and on the tip of that boar's hair, he attached a little bit of feather. He used that feather to draw lines in soot, either on paper or on glass, and it would scratch out what the vibrations were.

Oh my god, it sounds like an EKG. Yeah, yeah, it looks a lot like an EKG, and his idea was that, you know, maybe this could be like the 1850s version of speech to text. Uh, okay. He was hoping that by making these squiggly lines, with enough training, and if you like really studied it, you could look at those squiggles and read them like you would read shorthand. And so he wasn't really all that concerned that you could play it back because he never had the intention of playing it back.

Okay, so how do we... how do we get from... how could I hear that recording? What was the next step? So for 150 years, these things were just squiggles on smoky paper. It loops back on itself, you know, sometimes the stylus would flick off the page. Sheet music it is not, but there's this team, a group of scientists and historians, they call themselves First Sounds, and they figured out how to turn that squiggle into something that could be played back. And here is the first sound that has ever been recorded by humanity. [Music]

So, Amy, that song was pretty old—it's from 1857—but we can go much older than that. No, we can't. You said that was the first recorded sound. Baby, I'm on a quest. I'm on a quest! Oh no, to find the oldest oldie, and I've spent the last couple of weeks talking to archaeologists, historians, musicians. I'm trying to find the oldest music humanity has ever made from all over the world. Okay, and I have this kind of goofy dream where I want to take these sounds and combine them into one song, this sort of time machine orchestra of human history. I think it could sound pretty cool, but it might also be a dumb idea. What do you think?

Well, it's definitely not a dumb idea. No, but at the same time I'm like, okay, but like how do you start? Well, I guess we'll go into it now. Okay, but first I kind of wanted to do the little introduction thing. Go! I'm Brian Gutierrez and I'm Amy Briggs, executive editor of National Geographic History Magazine, and this is Overheard, a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have here at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world.

So let me get this straight. We're going to go back in time all over the world, we're going to collect different musical instruments, put them together into one big crazy song—Is that right? That's the plan! Alright, I'm so curious to see if we do it—more after the break or after the break? Okay, I mean, so our first stop on this wild musical history tour is ancient Greece.

Okay, I had a chance to talk with somebody who specializes in recreating music from that era. Apollo, the god of music or somebody else? Uh, actually, her name is Bettina Joy de Guzman. I am a researcher and academic historian—a teacher. The thing that I wanted to talk with Bettina about was this special artifact called the Stone of Siculus. That particular tombstone says, "I am a stone icon set here by Siculus for the remembering of all time."

There are so many unknowns, and yet what we do have is it's the oldest complete piece of music with lyrics, and that's what's so fascinating about it. Okay, so I have a question. Yes? How do we know it's a song and not a poem? Because it has music. Let me show you a picture of it. Okay, it doesn't look like sheet music. Really? No, it looks nothing like sheet music. But I can see like the letters on it. I can see the ancient Greek—not that I can read ancient Greek—but I could look at that and recognize it as text.

Yeah, but there are some funky little symbols sort of above and around the text, right? Those are the notes that tell you what the next note in the melody is. Do you know if it was designed for any particular instrument? This is just the melody and the lyrics, but she had a replica lyre with her. It was made out of a tortoise shell. There's this fabulous fun story called the Hymn to Hermes.

A disclaimer: the new baby Hermes suddenly develops into this little boy who is strong enough to see a tortoise and goes, "Oh wow, look at you, you're very interesting." And he kills it, cracks it open, guts it, and then makes the very first lyre out of it. Bettina pulled out this tortoiseshell lyre—it wasn't a real tortoiseshell, it was a replica—and played the song of Siculus. So here we go. [Music]

Do you want to know what it means? Yes! Tell me what it means. Bettina translated it as "While you live, shine." [Music] Because basically, life is short and time demands an end. We don't have life for long, my friend. That's what it's saying. I love bits of history like that, that are less about like the great big people who did great big things.

Yeah, you know, this is about, you know, there's something very personal and touching about someone in ancient Greece had the same concerns about living and dying and making good use of your life as we do now, right? You know, that's sort of eternal and common to, you know, all humans. I love those little bits, and actually hearing it sung, you know, it just cuts right through.

Yeah, and you know, I felt that same sense of connection to the past when I heard about the tomb of the Marquis Yi of Zang. Okay, who’s that? He is one of the most significant archaeological finds of the last century. What's so significant about it? It's kind of like King Tut in that it is a tomb of somebody that nobody had ever heard of before, but obviously he was an important person because he was buried in this large ornate tomb.

It was set out like a palace would have been back in the day, with big rooms inside of it, and each of these things is full of, you know, 7,000 artifacts of what life was like in Bronze Age China. One of the most important finds was that in that great hall where he would have in life entertained guests and held court was a full Bronze Age orchestra. Wow! It had flutes, it had drums, it had zithers, which is kind of like a string instrument, and there was this complete set of these 65 bronze bells.

Okay, are we talking like big giant Notre Dame-sized bells, or are we talking like jingle bells? Hand bells? What do they look like? The full gamut! They were almost as big as a human being all the way to handbell size, and instrument players would go up and they would hit them with mallets. Okay, so like chimes. Exactly! But they're shaped kind of like regular bells, except instead of a circle, they're oval-shaped.

They were kind of labeled really clearly: hit here for this tone, hit here for this sound, so you could get two tones out of one bell. Okay, so wait, you're an archaeologist? Yeah, but it's an artifact and probably you can't—you have to treat it with care and gently. But like, when do they test the instruments and play them and figure out what noises they make and under what conditions? Because they're probably not doing it in the tomb, I would imagine.

Occasionally they're played just for scientific reasons, and then they try to record them. I found one set of bells that are not these particular bells, but they're the same style of bell that are at the Smithsonian. The last time they played them was in 1991. The thing about those bells that's cool is the fact that you can get multiple tones out of them, right? Yeah! That they have—and it was actually pretty important for them to be able to play a lot of different kinds of sounds because music was really deeply ingrained in the political proceedings of the time. So they had to be really careful about getting it right.

So we know exactly when the Marquis Yi's tomb was buried—that was in 433 BCE—and around the same time, on the other side of the world, in pre-Incan Peru, there was this very different musical tradition that was underway. That's coming up after the break. Usually, how I start is with a quick introduction. Could you say your name and what you do? I'm John Rick, Emeritus Professor at Stanford University, and I'm an archaeologist by profession.

John spent most of his career investigating this one site in Peru. Chavin is really a series of temples. They take the form of platform mounds with a very strong but solid internal mass that is perforated by a series of tunnels we call galleries. You've been in some of these galleries? What was that like? A really interesting environment. It's very quiet. On the other hand, when there is noise, it tends to get distorted in such a way that you can't use normal echolocation.

John explained that this disorienting effect of underground echoes might have been intentional. Let's say you have a sound that's coming from 20 feet away. You might hear it as coming from 4 feet away, or you might hear it as coming from almost an infinite distance. And from what we can tell, at least it seems fairly probable that the people who built these underground spaces either were striving to achieve specific acoustic effects, or they were trying to get acoustic anomalies and uneasinesses that would be, you know, upsetting to people.

In 2001, he'd been asked by the Peruvian government to excavate one of these smaller chambers, and we'd only been working a few days before we hit our first complete conch shell trumpet. And you know, we could pick it up once it was fully excavated and documented, and once we'd cleared the dirt from the sounding hole, we could blow it. [Music]

So this was a stunning experience, and we went on to find another 19 complete shells and quite a number of broken-up shell trumpets. Wait, wait, back up. How did he know they were trumpets? Do you know what a conch is? Yes, I know what a conch is. It's a big shell! In order to convert the shell into an instrument you can play, you have to break off the spire in a very particular way. It could happen accidentally, but for it to happen 20 times in a row? Yeah, all the conch shells that were in that chamber.

Yeah, it's a little bit of a weird coincidence. And one thing that he and his colleagues have found out is that some of the architecture seems designed to enhance the sounds of the conch shell. My colleague Miriam Kohler, she was able to demonstrate that one particular duct was specifically designed to promote a number of frequencies, and it just turns out that the frequency range that she could document as being amplified by the duct corresponds to the central range of tone of the Strombus trumpets.

Strombus is the scientific name for conch. The sounds of the conch you're hearing now are part of a performance study recorded by archaeoacoustician Miriam Kohler and her colleagues on the shell trumpets found by John Rick and his team. They think there were these special ducts that were designed to carry the sound of the Strombus from inside the temple out into public spaces. [Music]

So we've hit some pretty old instruments so far. Yep, but we can go a lot older than that. Okay, there is one instrument I want to share with you, and this comes from one of our explorers. My name is Chahui Patoli. I am a wildlife cameraman, but I'm also a music producer. He had been out in the Serengeti filming a documentary when he came across this ancient musical instrument.

We walked up to this outcrop which has this incredible view of the savannah, and perched on top of the outcrop was this other rock. And it was a bizarre sight because it's not like that rock eroded and ended up there. And my colleague of mine, he was telling me that this is a rock on a rock. Gong? Yeah, exactly! There are these stones that have certain wear patterns that show that people have been hitting them over and over again, and archaeologists think they were used as percussion instruments.

And so we're just trying to find a place where there's as little wind as possible. When you think you're gonna hit a rock against a rock, you expect just to get that kind of like, tapping. But then to tap against this thing and hear this incredible tone that came out of it, it almost sounded like the rock was almost hollow or resonant. So here we are at a rock and, um, wow, amazing sound!

Two questions! Yeah, how big are they? And like, do they think that they were there naturally, or that people moved them there? They think they were moved, and they're massive! They are, you know, they're boulders. I don’t know, they're boulders. You're telling me the story—they look to be about maybe three or four feet in diameter! Okay, and I would guess, you know, more than a ton, maybe two tons.

One of the most fascinating things was the fact that the tribe that live in this area, the Hadza, they're one of the last true hunter-gatherer tribes left in the world. However, they didn't play the rock gongs for them. These were played by the people who inhabited this valley before them, and I mean, it's estimated that the Hadza could have been, you know, in that area for 40 to 50,000 years. So, I mean, just hearing that these could have been played that long ago was just, I mean, it was mind-blowing!

So there's an oral tradition that says they might be very old, but we really can't tell. Wow! So, tens of thousands of years old? How about tens of thousands? We don't know, but see, centuries are a rounding error at this point, right? And you know, these aren't the only examples of rock gongs. It's a fairly frequent occurrence. In the tomb of the Marquis Yi, there were rock chimes that were obviously rocks that were designed to be hit with mallets.

There's one last instrument, and this is the oldest man-made instrument that we know of so far. Kind of like the conch, kind of like the rock gong? Something that's sort of naturally found in nature? Naturally found in nature. It is natural. Maybe that's a more concise way of saying it. Okay, so it's sort of a ready-made instrument, and it's not like a pan flute. It also has to be something that would last a long time.

So like a pan flute? They may well have had them, but... Alright, give me a hint! Flute! Flute's not a hint. So I was right, it's a wind instrument? Yeah, but what's it made of? Brian, if it's not made of—if it's not made of like wood or reeds, what's it made out of? Bone! Oh, ew! So animal bone or people bone?

Well, in Chavin, they have found people flutes, but the oldest flute that we have is made from a vulture bone. Oh, that's right! Yeah, cause bird bones are hollow! Bird bones are naturally hollow. Okay, so where is the vulture bone from? This bone was actually found in a cave in southern Germany. The cave was called Hohle Fels, and archaeologists think that it is 40,000 years old.

Oh jeez! That is—you know, before agriculture. This is like when Neanderthals are alive. This is when woolly mammoths are alive. They're not entirely sure how it was played, but a few people have tried to make recreations of it, and I talked to a flautist—her name is Anna Podingowski—and she has tried to recreate what it might have sounded like.

Okay, so what does it sound like? [Music] When the flautist starts doing that drilling thing, I was like, oh, okay, you could actually make something that sounds like modern music! So like, okay, we've got all these instruments? Yeah! Yeah, what are we gonna do with them?

So I got these five instruments: flute, conch, rock gong, bells, lyre, and I've gone out, through the magic of modern audio digital music production, put them together into one big song! Excellent! Do you mind if I give you a quick tour before we get into it? Okay, what did you learn when you tried to compose a song for these five instruments from across time?

Well, one thing that really captured my imagination was that for most of these instruments, you really have no idea how they were played. Wait, wait! What's the other way you'd play a conch shell then? Maybe, for example, instead of just playing it like a trumpet, one of the archaeologists thought that they might have tried to use it to replicate the roar of a jaguar! Wow!

So that was through a conch shell? That route noise? Yeah! By shouting into the shell, you could create all kinds of strange and eerie noises! We, as Americans, are really used to this western tradition of music, and for this episode, I was trying to get away from that as much as I could. I wanted it to sound a little bit like it could have come from a different culture.

And so one of the ideas that I had was to work a little bit with polyrhythms. So explain—explain what polyrhythms are. A polyrhythm is when you have two or more different rhythms happening at the same time, but they mesh together in an interesting way. So I found a really simple polyrhythm that I tried to incorporate with the rock gong. You'll hear that one rhythm is going as half notes, and the other rhythm is going as triplets.

Another idea I got was from one of the archaeoacousticians who worked with the conch shells. She told me that when you play more than one conch shell together, it creates the strange beating effect—like a pulsating between the notes! Yeah, exactly! When you have two sounds that are kind of close to each other, but they aren't exactly the same, then they will create this pulsing, almost.

So let me show you what just one of these conch shell sounds like on its own. Okay, very low, very resonant! Yeah, well I pitched it down a little bit, but when you play two of them together, you'll hear that beating effect. [Music] Oh yeah! Right in the middle where the two tones meet, you can hear it—it's almost like it's shaking.

So putting all these sounds together, here's the song. [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Bravo! Thank you, Brian, that's amazing! Thanks! I'm glad you think so. My hope is that people will listen to this and maybe feel a little bit of that sense of like there were people just like you and me.

Imagining that, I think, was really enlightening for me. It's a fantastic way to connect to the people of the past, especially people who, you know, because they don't have written records, it can be hard to know them, but the fact that they share the same desire to be heard and create atmosphere and experience, I mean, that's tremendous, and it's a great way to connect people to who came before.

This episode was just the tip of the rock gong. If you still have some curiosity in the tank, we've provided a few rabbit holes for you in the form of links to National Geographic articles, for example, how overfishing is threatening conchs in the Bahamas and the story of how a cave bear bone flute made by Neanderthals might actually be a cave bear bone chewed by hyenas. You can find those links in our show notes.

We've also included links and more information about each of the instruments featured in this episode. Plus, don't miss "Welcome to Earth," a Disney+ original series from National Geographic, where Will Smith is led on an epic adventure around the world to explore Earth's greatest wonders. All six episodes stream December 8th only on Disney+.

If you like what you hear and you want to support more content like this, please rate and review us in your podcast app and consider a National Geographic subscription. That's the best way to support Overheard. Go to nationalgeographic.com/explore to subscribe. Overheard at National Geographic is produced by Brian Gutierrez, Jacob Pinter, Marcy Thompson, and Alana Strauss. Our senior editor is Eli Chen. Our senior producer is Carla Wills. Our executive producer of audio is Davar Ardellan, who edited this episode. Our fact checkers are Robin Palmer and Julie Beer. Our copy editor is Amy Kolszak. Ted Woods sound designed this episode, and Hans Dale Sue composed our theme music.

Special thanks to the many people who shared sounds for this episode, including First Sounds, Bettina Joy de Guzman, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, John Rick, Miriam Kohler, Jihawi Bertoli, and Anna Podingowski. The bells you heard in this episode were a gift of Arthur M. Sackler to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. This episode is a production of National Geographic Partners.

The National Geographic Society is committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, funds the work of National Geographic explorer Jihawi Bertoli. Whitney Johnson is the director of visuals and immersive experiences. Susan Goldberg is National Geographic's editorial director, and I'm Brian Gutierrez. Thank you for listening. See you all next time. [Music]