Thanks to the tire­less efforts of archae­ol­o­gists, we have a pret­ty clear idea of what much of the ancient world looked like, at least as far as the clothes peo­ple wore and the struc­tures in and around which they spent their days. But we sel­dom imag­ine these lives among the ruins-before-they-became-ruins in col­or, despite hav­ing read in the his­to­ry books that some ancient builders and artists cre­at­ed a col­or­ful world indeed, espe­cial­ly when a spe­cial archi­tec­tur­al occa­sion like an Egypt­ian tem­ple called for it.

“As depict­ed in pop­u­lar cul­ture, ancient Egypt is awash with the col­or beige,” writes the New York Times’ Joshua Barone. “A trip to the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art would seem to reflect that notion: The Tem­ple of Den­dur, with its weath­er­worn sand­stone, could fit in nat­u­ral­ly with the earth tones of Aida or The Mum­my.

But Egyp­tol­o­gists know that this tem­ple, like many oth­ers of the ancient world, was paint­ed with vivid col­ors and pat­terns. In ‘Col­or the Tem­ple,’ a mar­riage of research and pro­jec­tion-map­ping tech­nol­o­gy, vis­i­tors to the Met can now glimpse what the Tem­ple of Den­dur may have looked like in its orig­i­nal, poly­chro­mat­ic form more than 2,000 years ago.”

Image via @Burning_Luke

While the rav­ages of time haven’t destroyed the var­i­ous scenes carved into the tem­ple’s walls, they’ve long made it next to impos­si­ble for schol­ars to get an idea of what col­ors their cre­ators paint­ed them. Orig­i­nal­ly locat­ed on the banks of the Nile, the tem­ple endured cen­tu­ry after cen­tu­ry of flood­ing (by the 1920s, almost nine months out of the year) which thor­ough­ly washed away the sur­face of the images. But after some seri­ous his­tor­i­cal research, includ­ing the con­sul­ta­tion of a 1906 sur­vey by Egyp­tol­o­gist Ayl­ward M. Black­man and the Napoleon­ic Descrip­tion de l’E­gypte, the Met’s team has come up with a pret­ty plau­si­ble idea of what the scene on the tem­ple’s south wall, in which Emper­or Cae­sar Augus­tus in Pharaoh garb presents wine to the deities Hathor and Horus, looked like in full col­or.

But it would hard­ly do to buy a few buck­ets from Sher­win-Williams and sim­ply fill the wall in. Instead, the Met has used a much more advanced tech­nol­o­gy called dig­i­tal pro­jec­tion map­ping (also known, more Wired-ly, as “spa­tial aug­ment­ed real­i­ty”) to restore the Tem­ple of Den­dur’s col­ors with light. You can get a sense of the result in the two videos at the top of the post, shot dur­ing the Col­or the Tem­ple exhi­bi­tion which ran through March 19.

For a clos­er look into the process, have a look at the video just above, cre­at­ed by Maria Paula Saba, who worked on the project. As you can see, the use of light rather than paint allows for the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent col­or schemes, all of them quite pos­si­bly what the ancient Egyp­tians saw when they passed by, all of them fit­ting right in to the details and con­tours the ancient Egypt­ian artists put there — a thrill impos­si­ble to over­state for those of us who grew up with ancient-Egypt col­or­ing books.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Were Built: A New The­o­ry in 3D Ani­ma­tion

Try the Old­est Known Recipe For Tooth­paste: From Ancient Egypt, Cir­ca the 4th Cen­tu­ry BC

The Turin Erot­ic Papyrus: The Old­est Known Depic­tion of Human Sex­u­al­i­ty (Cir­ca 1150 B.C.E.)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Unless you’re an audio engi­neer, you’ll have lit­tle rea­son to know what the term “con­vo­lu­tion reverb” means. But it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing con­cept nonethe­less. Tech­ni­cians bring high-end micro­phones, speak­ers, and record­ing equip­ment to a par­tic­u­lar­ly res­o­nant space—a grain silo, for exam­ple, or famous con­cert hall. They cap­ture what are called “impulse respons­es,” sig­nals that con­tain the acoustic char­ac­ter­is­tics of the loca­tion. The tech­nique pro­duces a three dimen­sion­al audio imprint—enabling us to recre­ate what it would sound like to sing, play the piano or gui­tar, or stage an entire con­cert in that space. As Adri­enne LaFrance writes in The Atlantic, “you can apply [impulse respons­es] to a record­ing cap­tured in anoth­er space and make it sound as though that record­ing had tak­en place in the orig­i­nal build­ing.”

This kind of map­ping, writes Alli­son Meier at Hyper­al­ler­gic, allows researchers to “build an archive of a building’s sound, with all its nuances, echoes, and ric­o­chets, that could sur­vive even if the build­ing fell.” And that is pre­cise­ly what researchers have been doing since 2014 in ancient Greek Byzan­tine church­es. The project began when Sharon Ger­s­tel, Pro­fes­sor of Byzan­tine Art His­to­ry and Arche­ol­o­gy at UCLA, and Chris Kyr­i­akakis, direc­tor of the Immer­sive Audio Lab­o­ra­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, met to dis­cuss their mutu­al inter­est in cap­tur­ing the sound of these spaces.

(Hear them both explain the gen­e­sis of the project in the CBC inter­view above.) The two researchers trav­eled to Thes­sa­loni­ki, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, Kyr­i­akakis’ home­town, and began, as Ger­s­tel puts it, to “mea­sure the church­es.” LaFrance’s Atlantic arti­cle gives us a detailed descrip­tion of the mea­sure­ment process, which involves play­ing and record­ing a tone that sweeps through the audi­ble fre­quen­cy spec­trum. You’ll hear it in the video at the top of the post as a “chirp”—bouncing off the var­i­ous archi­tec­tur­al sur­faces as the voic­es of singers would have hun­dreds of years ago.

In that video and in the audio record­ing above, chanters in a stu­dio had the audio char­ac­ter­is­tics of these church­es applied to their voic­es, recre­at­ing the sounds that filled the spaces in the ear­ly Chris­t­ian cen­turies. As anoth­er mem­ber of the team, James Don­ahue—Pro­fes­sor of Music Pro­duc­tion and Engi­neer­ing at Berklee Col­lege of Music—discovered, the church­es had been acousti­cal­ly designed to pro­duce spe­cif­ic sound effects. “It wasn’t just about the archi­tec­ture,” says Don­ahue, “they had these big jugs that were put up there to sip cer­tain fre­quen­cies out of the air… They built dif­fu­sion, a way to break up the sound waves… They were active­ly try­ing to tune the space.” In addi­tion, the builders “dis­cov­ered some­thing that we call slap echo. [In the ancient world], they described it as the sound of angels’ wings.”

The project not only allows art his­to­ri­ans to enter the past, but it also pre­serves that past far into the future, cre­at­ing what LaFrance calls a “muse­um of lost sound.” After all, the church­es them­selves will even­tu­al­ly recede into his­to­ry. “Some of these build­ings may not exist lat­er,” says Kyr­i­akakis, “Some of these his­toric build­ings are being destroyed.” With immer­sive video and audio tech­nol­o­gy, we will still be able to expe­ri­ence much of their grandeur long after they’re gone.

via the CBC/Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Same Song Sung in 15 Places: A Won­der­ful Case Study of How Land­scape & Archi­tec­ture Shape the Sounds of Music

David Byrne: How Archi­tec­ture Helped Music Evolve

The His­to­ry of West­ern Archi­tec­ture: From Ancient Greece to Roco­co (A Free Online Course)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness