Music in Finnish Rock Walls and Scottish Book Margins

Music has been described as “the art of sound.” It’s a way to express beliefs, histories and values. It has shaped cultures and societies around the world for generations, used in religious ceremonies, to mark life events or to pass down stories. It has the power to alter your mood, change your perception and inspire your actions. Music is a pervasive part of our environments and landscapes, present in ancient civilizations as well as our own, today.

Sometimes, that presence is found in unexpected places. For example, researchers in Finland recently performed acoustic, impulse-response measurements in front of 37, 5,000-year-old, rock-painting sites and found that the same vertical surfaces that display painted boats, elks and humans are also effective sound reflectors. The unique shape of the tall, granite cliffs in these locations and the boundaries they share with water bodies create powerful, single echoes that reverberate back at whoever makes a sound in their direction.

And, a little closer to our own times, a fragment of “lost” music was found in the pages of Scotland’s first full-length printed book, providing clues about what music sounded like 500 years ago. Scholars have been investigating the origins of the musical score—which contains only 55 notes—to cast new light on music from pre-Reformation Scotland in the early 16th-century.

“Talking” rock animals

Prehistoric rock-art images that are carved or painted onto rock surfaces are visual symbols that ancient peoples used to convey meaning in the absence of a written language. Figures of humans, other animals and symbols—made with pigments created from minerals, such as charcoal, clay or ochre and applied with a brush made from animal hair or bones—tell stories of everyday life, as well as great feats. They are windows into the minds of our ancestors.

Now, imagine that you’re standing by a lake in Finland 5,000 years ago. You gaze upon one of these visual stories, one that includes painted elks and humans. You open your mouth to utter a sound of astonishment or joy. Your voice bounces back from the adorned cliffs, and the elk and humans represented before you seem to “speak.”

New research is revealing that some prehistoric, rock-art sites in Finland, dating from 5000 to 1500 B.C., weren’t just visual galleries—they were carefully chosen acoustic spaces where art and sound merged to create extraordinary sensory experiences. Researchers recently explored the connection between these cliffs’ unique properties and the people who painted the images of boats, drummers, elk, humans and human–animal hybrids on their surfaces.

The Finnish Lake District emerged after the recession of the Continental Ice Sheet, leaving as many as 35,000 small and large lakes behind. Like the granite massifs in Yosemite National Park, the cliffs here, rubbed by ice, are smooth, creating a unique acoustic profile that creates distinct, single-repeat echoes that accurately mirror sounds.

Thousands of years ago, hunter-gatherers approached these cliffs either by canoes or on the ice in wintertime and painted images on their surfaces. They sometimes left offerings, revealed by underwater archaeology.

The Finnish research team conducted their measurements on 37, ancient rock-painting sites under challenging conditions, using custom-designed recording equipment deployed from rafts or during the winter from the lake ice. According to the psychoacoustic criterion used, the echoes were so strong that there is no reason to assume that the people in the past did not hear them. So, prehistoric visitors would have experienced the painted elks “talking” and heard their own voices seemingly emanating from behind the depicted human figures, creating an illusion of responding with voices that resembled their own. In this way, the auditory and visual images overlapped, merging into one multisensory experience.

It follows that the sites of these rock-art images aren’t random locations; they were natural amphitheaters where sight and sound combined in ways that must have seemed magical to our ancestors. The possibility to communicate reciprocally with the physical environment or more-than-human worlds may have been an essential reason why these cliffs were visited and painted, and why offerings were left to them. For the history of music and sound, this study provides an example of the significant role sound reflections could have had in past societies. Reverberative landscape features have also been acknowledged to have played a role in socioreligious practices in the Andes Mountains, where a pre-Incan site called Viejo Sangayaico was found to have a large, hollowed-out “dance floor” that would have produced a resonance that echoed through the surrounding hills

“Lost” musical scores

There’s more cultural environmental news from centuries past. A fragment of “lost” music found in the pages of Scotland’s first full-length printed book is allowing us to listen to 500-year-old music.

This tantalizing discovery, a report of which is published in the journal Music and Letters in November 2024, is the only piece of music—containing only 55 notes—which survives from the northeast of Scotland from this period. Scholars from the Edinburgh College of Art and KU Leuven in Belgium have been investigating the origins of this score to cast new light on Scottish music from the early 16th century.

The scholars made the discovery in a copy of the Aberdeen Breviary of 1510, a collection of hymns, prayers, psalms and readings used for daily worship in Scotland. It also includes detailed writings on the lives of Scottish saints. Known as the “Glamis copy” since it was formerly held in Glamis Castle in Angus, it is now in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Despite the musical score having no attribution, text or title, researchers have identified it as a unique musical harmonization of Cultor Dei, a nighttime hymn sung during the season of Lent.

The Aberdeen Breviary came from an initiative by King James IV who issued a royal patent to print books containing orders of service in accordance with Scottish religious practices, rather than needing to rely on importing texts from England or Europe. The researchers say the composition is from the Aberdeenshire region, with probable links to St. Mary’s Chapel, Rattray—in Scotland’s far northeastern corner—and to cathedrals in Aberdeen.

The discovery was made as researchers examined numerous handwritten annotations in the margins of the Glamis copy. Of primary interest to the scholars was a fragment of music—spread over two lines, the second of which is approximately half the length of the first—on a blank page in a section of the book dedicated to matins, an early morning service.

The presence of the music was a puzzle for the Edinburgh College of Art and KU Leuven team. It was not part of the original printed book, yet it was written on a page bound into the structure of the tome—not slipped in later. That suggests that the writer wanted to keep the music and the book together. In the absence of any textual annotations on the page, it’s not clear whether the music was sacred, secular or even for voices at all, the researchers say.

After an investigation, they deduced it was polyphonic—when two or more lines of independent melody are sung or played at the same time. Sources from the time say this technique was common in Scottish religious institutions; however, very few examples have survived to the present day.

Looking closer, one of the team members realized that the music was a perfect fit with a Gregorian chant melody; specifically, that it was the tenor part from a faburden, a three- or four-voice musical harmonization, on the hymn Cultor Dei. The fact that the tenor part is a harmony to a well-known melody means that researchers can reconstruct the other missing parts. As a result, from just one line of music scrawled on a blank page, we can hear a hymn that had lain silent for nearly five centuries, a small but precious artifact of Scotland’s musical and religious traditions.

“Marginal” art

Even though we might not understand the exact meaning ancient rock-art images had for the people who made them, they still provide beautiful connections to those who inhabited the Earth before us. The ability they demonstrated to communicate reciprocally with the physical environment has a lesson for us. People once experienced their landscapes—both public and private spaces—not only as passive art galleries, but as dynamic environments where sight, sound and spirituality converged.

The old, musical Scottish fragment underscores the crucial role of marginalia as an added source of new insights into human culture where little material survives. It may well be that further discoveries on how we lived in our environments and landscapes—artistic or otherwise—still lie in wait in the natural canvases of rock walls and the blank spaces in book margins.

Here’s to finding your true places and natural habitats,

Candy

To hear the acoustics of some rock art sites in Finland, listen to the soundtrack found here. This sample simulates what incanting or talking would have sounded like at the Keltavuori rock-art site in Lappeenranta, Finland, about 2,500 years ago. The fisherman in this piece recites an incantation in front of a painted lakeshore cliff, which responds to the sounds with an echo. The lyrics in early Proto-Sami (a hypothetical, reconstructed common ancestor of the Sami languages) are based on cultural and linguistic reconstruction.