0:08 something. This is water reacting to [Music]
0:11 [Music]
0:14 sound. This is what music looks [Music]
0:17 [Music]
0:20 like. But this isn't a video about
0:24 music. This is a video about worship
0:25 made visible. [Music]
0:37 This is a story about mysterious symbols
0:40 carved into stone 600 years ago, and
0:42 only now are we beginning to understand
0:46 them. This is Roslin Chapel. It sits
0:48 quietly in the Scottish countryside.
0:51 It's Gothic and ornate and overflowing
0:54 with meaning. You might recognize it
0:56 from the Da Vinci Code. It's long been
0:59 linked to the Knights Templar. But the
1:01 story that I'm going to share is
1:03 stranger than all of that. Because this
1:07 chapel doesn't just have a song. The
1:10 chapel is a song. Lying in its arches
1:14 are 213 small cubes, each carved with
1:17 these strange dots and lines. At first
1:19 glance, it looks like nothing, just
1:22 ornate decorations. For centuries, no
1:25 one knew what they meant. Then in 2007,
1:27 a father and son named Thomas and
1:30 Steuart Mitchell cracked the code. They
1:33 realized these weren't decorations. They
1:36 were simatic patterns. Simatics is the
1:39 study of how sound creates shape. And
1:41 when a frequency passes through a
1:44 surface like water or metal, patterns
1:48 emerge. Circles, stars, grids, mandelas.
1:50 And each shape is unique to the
1:52 frequency or the note being played with
1:55 it. The researchers went through the
1:58 chapel and they matched each cube to a
2:00 tone and then mapped them all in a
2:03 sequence. Then they played them. The
2:05 result was a melody that they called the
2:10 Roslin motet. It's a slow chantlike hymn
2:13 carved into stone. It was a secret
2:16 hiding in plain sight, waiting centuries
2:18 to be heard.
2:22 But Roslin isn't the only place where
2:23 this connection
2:26 exists. Medieval builders believed something
2:27 something
2:30 profound. They thought that sound and
2:33 structure were not separate, that they
2:35 were speaking to the same thing, that
2:38 music and architecture actually speak
2:40 the same language. And they didn't just
2:43 build a space for worship. The space
2:46 itself was worship. Gothic cathedrals
2:49 like Chartra and Notre Dame follow
2:52 musical ratios in their building. You
2:55 have the octave, a 2:1
3:00 ratio, and the fifth, a 3:2 ratio. To
3:01 the builders, these weren't just
3:05 numbers. They were sacred proportions.
3:07 They were a way of expressing divine
3:11 order in stone. Roslin Chapel follows
3:14 this exact same principle. It carved the
3:16 music into the very shape of the
3:18 building. Worship wasn't just something
3:21 that happened inside of the chapel. The
3:24 chapel was worship. The chapel itself
3:26 was the song. And when you play the
3:30 Roslin motet inside, the room responds.
3:33 The melody echoes. It loops. It
3:35 surrounds you. But it wasn't just built
3:39 for good acoustics. It was built to be a
3:42 spiritual amplifier. It's a vessel for
3:45 the language of God. Garter once said
3:49 that architecture is frozen music.
3:52 Rosalyn Chapel is the rare place where
3:55 it melts back into sound. Sometimes the
3:58 sacred hides in plain sight. It gets
4:01 buried in geometry and sound and
4:03 silence. But there are cathedrals
4:06 everywhere if you have the eyes to see
4:09 them or in this case the ears to hear
4:11 them. If you are new here, my name is
4:13 Taylor McMahon. And if you want to see
4:16 more deep dives into the hidden and
4:18 forgotten parts of our world, please
4:21 subscribe and turn on the notifications.
4:24 According to my stats, 97% of my viewers
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4:30 you want to check out the fact checks
4:31 for this episode, you can do so by
4:33 checking out my newsletter, which is
4:35 linked in the show notes. And I'll see
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