Music – whether in the beat of a drum or the strum of a guitar, it gets our feet tapping and our heads bobbing. Our capacity for rhythm and melody is special, but are we the only ones who can make music?
Click start to play the Weekend Crossword, where you can identify all the musical instruments.
The short answer is no. Nature is full of wild and wonderful orchestras – we know this because just a short walk into a field, forest or other area that has animals can reveal hoots, chirps and bleats. But it’s not just our natural environment that is musical… from pyramids to roads, there are many surprising things humans have built that can be melodic.
Here, we find 5 ‘sound tourism’ spots from around the world that are guaranteed to be music to your ears:
Croatia’s sea organs
Along Zadar’s seafront promenade in Croatia, are 25 organ pipes. But they require no human presence to sound out a melody; the ocean and the wind are its musicians. The waves’ movement pushes air through the organ pipes to create notes at random, resulting in pleasing melodies and harmonies that are never the same!
Virginia’s Luray Caverns
The Great Stalacpipe Organ in Luray Caverns, US, was invented in 1954 by Leland Sprinkle, a mathematician and electronics scientist who worked at the Pentagon, the headquarters of the country's Department of Defense. When he toured the natural wonder, he watched in awe as a tour guide tapped one of the ancient stone formations – stalactites and stalagmites – with a small mallet, producing a musical tone. Sprinkle immediately conceived a project to alter some of the enormous stalagmites with the aid of English tuning forks. The result is the world’s largest musical instrument, with each stalagmite producing a different note. When played together, the music takes on an ethereal quality, as the sound echoes all around the deep caverns.
Kazakhstan’s singing sand dunes
When Venetian explorer Marco Polo crossed this desert area in Kazakhstan, in his travels, he thought the boom of the dunes (pictured above) originated from mischievous spirits, who created the unusual sound with drums. But in reality, some of the sand dunes have just the right type of sand, which synchronise with the wind and sing in a coordinated choir. The sound is similar to that of a low-pitched organ or the rumble of an aeroplane.
Mexico’s step pyramid Kukulkan
No one knows if the Mayan pyramid at the archaeological site of Chichén Itzá was deliberately made to convert the sound of clapping into an incredible series of chirps. The sound occurs when you clap at the bottom of the pyramid steps. Apparently, the pattern of sound ricocheting off the treads of the staircase is responsible for the chirping sound.
United States’ musical road
A stretch of road in Lancaster, California, creates a surprisingly close rendition of Italian composer Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell overture. Grooves in the road vibrate the car wheels in just the right spots, to create musical notes. While some grooves are bunched close together and hit high notes, others are set farther apart and form low notes, together creating a melody that leaves every driver on the road smiling.
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