The Secret Codes Found Inside Cathedrals | Taylor McMahon | YouTubeToText
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something. This is water reacting to [Music]
[Music]
sound. This is what music looks [Music]
[Music]
like. But this isn't a video about
music. This is a video about worship
made visible. [Music]
This is a story about mysterious symbols
carved into stone 600 years ago, and
only now are we beginning to understand
them. This is Roslin Chapel. It sits
quietly in the Scottish countryside.
It's Gothic and ornate and overflowing
with meaning. You might recognize it
from the Da Vinci Code. It's long been
linked to the Knights Templar. But the
story that I'm going to share is
stranger than all of that. Because this
chapel doesn't just have a song. The
chapel is a song. Lying in its arches
are 213 small cubes, each carved with
these strange dots and lines. At first
glance, it looks like nothing, just
ornate decorations. For centuries, no
one knew what they meant. Then in 2007,
a father and son named Thomas and
Steuart Mitchell cracked the code. They
realized these weren't decorations. They
were simatic patterns. Simatics is the
study of how sound creates shape. And
when a frequency passes through a
surface like water or metal, patterns
emerge. Circles, stars, grids, mandelas.
And each shape is unique to the
frequency or the note being played with
it. The researchers went through the
chapel and they matched each cube to a
tone and then mapped them all in a
sequence. Then they played them. The
result was a melody that they called the
Roslin motet. It's a slow chantlike hymn
carved into stone. It was a secret
hiding in plain sight, waiting centuries
to be heard.
But Roslin isn't the only place where
this connection
exists. Medieval builders believed something
something
profound. They thought that sound and
structure were not separate, that they
were speaking to the same thing, that
music and architecture actually speak
the same language. And they didn't just
build a space for worship. The space
itself was worship. Gothic cathedrals
like Chartra and Notre Dame follow
musical ratios in their building. You
have the octave, a 2:1
ratio, and the fifth, a 3:2 ratio. To
the builders, these weren't just
numbers. They were sacred proportions.
They were a way of expressing divine
order in stone. Roslin Chapel follows
this exact same principle. It carved the
music into the very shape of the
building. Worship wasn't just something
that happened inside of the chapel. The
chapel was worship. The chapel itself
was the song. And when you play the
Roslin motet inside, the room responds.
The melody echoes. It loops. It
surrounds you. But it wasn't just built
for good acoustics. It was built to be a
spiritual amplifier. It's a vessel for
the language of God. Garter once said
that architecture is frozen music.
Rosalyn Chapel is the rare place where
it melts back into sound. Sometimes the
sacred hides in plain sight. It gets
buried in geometry and sound and
silence. But there are cathedrals
everywhere if you have the eyes to see
them or in this case the ears to hear
them. If you are new here, my name is
Taylor McMahon. And if you want to see
more deep dives into the hidden and
forgotten parts of our world, please
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linked in the show notes. And I'll see
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