Sonic Wonderland by Trevor Cox

Author:Trevor Cox [Trevor Cox]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

With children enjoying yelling and listening as their voices repeat over and over again, the atmosphere is like a crowded day at a swimming pool. Van der Schoot was carrying out acoustic measurements and so had the rare pleasure of enjoying the mausoleum when empty: ‘It took us two years to get the proper permissions and clearing the place for a couple of hours. Bus loads of people were held at the gate so we could do our work in silence in the astonishing whispering galler[y], where, when it is silent, you can count 10 echoes to your whisper.’35

As much pleasure as Gol Gumbaz gives its visitors, the whispering gallery was an accident of design. The decision to put a dome on top of the hall was made only after building had begun. I can find evidence of only one whispering gallery constructed deliberately. According to a 1924 edition of Through the Ages magazine, ‘The whispering gallery in the Missouri State Capitol [Jefferson City, 1917] was carefully, mathematically laid out by a celebrated expert on acoustics, and this is undoubtedly the first time on record that such a thing has been done successfully.’36

For an acoustics conference, I produced some animations of how sound waves move around a whispering gallery. Using the latest algorithms on a fast computer, the film showed how whispers are carried around by hugging the walls. In an idle moment while preparing my talk, I dashed over to the library to borrow a copy of the nineteenth-century acoustic bible The Theory of Sound, by Lord Rayleigh, which, remarkably, he wrote while recovering from rheumatic fever in Egypt. His description of how whispering galleries work is simple to sketch out – much easier than using my complex computer models.

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