Last year, Scottish composer Stuart Mitchell was hailed a “genius” when his research led to the unravelling of musical codes embodied in 213 stone cubes in the ceiling of the Midlothian chapel. The music, since transcribed and dubbed by Mitchell as The Rosslyn Canon Of Proportions, contained notation designed to be performed by mediaeval players and was described as “sounding like a nursery rhyme”.
While admitting the cubes contained “a lot of symbolism and decoys to throw people off”, Mitchell has so far kept details of these close to his chest.
But Allan, who has been researching the chapel with his wife Ann since 1992, now believes the devil is in the detail.
“I’ve no doubt [Mitchell] is a very knowledgeable man who knows what he’s talking about but some of the cubes were missing,” he said. “I think the true secret is not the musical score. I think what the cubes represent is something called the Devil’s chord, which is in fact an augmented fourth.”
The Devil’s chord — a low frequency sound in the range of 80 to 110 hertz — was proscribed by the Catholic Church in the middle ages. It was believed that people exposed to the chord for prolonged periods of time would start to achieve altered states of consciousness.
Forget The Da Vinci Code … carvings at Rosslyn reveal symphony for the devil (Herald, via Daily Grail)
Jerry Goldsmith made use of the devil’s tritone in his score for The Omen [Quicktime trailer] [soundtrack @ Amazon]. Here’s a very short soundfile illustrating the tritone. (Hearing that coming from a belltower might be a little unnerving!)