Musique concrète

[Images: Rosslyn Chapel, container of symphonies].

I meant to post this ages ago – at the beginning of the summer – but it slipped right by... So this isn't exactly news, but I still love it: Scotland's Rosslyn Chapel, world famous for its appearance in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, has apparently been hiding a fascinating secret, after all.
It turns out that "[a] father and son who became fascinated by symbols carved into the chapel’s arches say they have deciphered a musical score encrypted in them."

[Image: The intricate ceilingry of Rosslyn Chapel, photographed by Benjamin Lee; via Sacred Destinations].

From the website of Thomas J. Mitchell, who "decrypted" the music: "Rosslyn Chapel holds a musical mystery in its architecture and design. At one end of the chapel, on the ceiling are 4 cross-sections of arches containing elaborate symbolic designs on each array of cubes (in actual fact they are rectangles mostly). The 'cubes' are attached to the arches in a musically sequential way."
In the over-ambitious application of a cryogenics metaphor, Mitchell says that the music has now "thawed out" to be understood – and heard – by people today. Being a composer, he also seems to have released the music on CD.

[Image: The Rosslyn Chapel doorway, photographed by seth + lara m.; via Sacred Destinations].

Whether or not there really is music encoded in the arches of Rosslyn, the implications of this are exciting.
Will someone detect, for instance, a thousand years from now, a symphony encoded in the runways at Heathrow? Or will the New York City subway system be reunderstood as a series of sub-terrestrial folk songs, themed around a chorus of transportation?
Or perhaps the International Space Station will be revealed after all as an étude of pressurized air tanks, awaiting its musical decryption; it is three-dimensional music, hovering in space.

(Thanks, Christopher! And happy birthday!)