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METAGEUM '07
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Conference session: Voices from Stone
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About John Reid
John Reid is an acoustics engineer who studied the acoustics of public buildings, churches and cathedrals for thirty years in his role as a consultant with a private company. He retired from business in 1999 in order to follow a career in specialist acoustics research and he is the inventor of CymaScope, a machine with worldwide patents which exhibits the complex structure of sound in a visual medium. The CymaGlyph patterns, which appear on a membrane, are then analysed mathematically. This Cymatics research led him to use the technique to study the acoustics of the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid, where he stretched a membrane over the sarcophagus and sat back to watch, for the first time in history, the harmonic structure of the 4-ton granite box.
The results of this research led to a unique hypothesis, in collaboration with his colleague, David Elkington, author of In the Name of the Gods, to which John also contributed. Their joint work may explain how the language and iconography of a culture are linked at a fundamental level. John has a booklet Egyptian Sonics which gives a detailed account of his sonics research in Egypt and copies will be available at Metageum.
Background: Egypt's precision technology in the pyramid age
In the final years of the last millennium, there was much speculation about the precision technology of the ancient Egyptians, especially during the pyramid age. So exact was the cutting, drilling, and manufacture of sarcophagi, building blocks, life-like statues and portable items, such as jars and bowls, all fashioned from some of the hardest rocks in the world, that some historical researchers proposed that the pyramid builders must have used modern-day techniques. These included lathes and diamond- or sapphire-tipped cutting tools. It was a theory first explored in the nineteenth century by the British egyptologist W Flinders Petrie, who made a detailed study of ancient Egyptian stone technology.
Then the millennium came, and such revolutionary ideas crashed as the new egyptology, created by the likes of Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, fell quickly out of favour. Yet one engineer who remained fascinated by Egypt's precision stone technology was John Reid. He has not just dedicated his life to exploring the evidence first hand, but has also successfully recreated the drills and tools that might have been used by our distant ancestors. This fascinating research project has shown that the pyramid builders really did have an amazing stone-cutting technology unequalled even in our own day.
At Metageum '07
Voices from Stone
An overview of ancient people's use of sound including experiences John has had in British burial mounds. John will follow this by a more specific example, that of the ancient Egyptians, explaining how their hieroglyphic written langauge was almost certainly inspired by aspects of their soundscape that he will detail.
John will describe other aspects of his acoustics experiments in the Great Pyramid and Red Pyramid including a description of the sacred feminine aspect of his theory. He will also describe the cymatics experiment and discuss his major healing experience of his lower back, which, immediately prior to the session in the King's Chamber, was highly unstable and causing severe pain. He walked out pain free and the pain never came back.
John will describe an experiment he has designed in which the voices of the ancient Egyptians and other ancient peoples may one day be recovered from stone and metal objects, a principle verified by two atomic scientists I am collaborating with.
We will also hear an excerpt from an interview with late John Marke, the engineer who heard voices from the past in an experiment he conducted in an old Welsh building. His story became world news in the 1980's and he was visited by the CIA who borrowed the tape recording, never to be seen again.
Finally, there will be a live demonstration of the acoustic signature of the space in which the conference is being held. John will be bring a CymaScope and other sound equipment from England. Attendees could also view their own voice patterns, named CymaGlyphs.
See also: Sacred soundscape.