Dan Brown

I Was Looking at the Ceiling And Then…

May 17, 2011 by Molly Sheridan

I have been completely sucked into the series currently running on Slate investigating the carvings inside Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, and today’s installment asks a musical question:Â “Are the chapel’s mysterious stone symbols a musical score?”

I’ve always associated the whole “amazing things in sand and sonic frequency” bit with the work of Alvin Lucier (and coincidentally, I just got a press release for a performance of his Queen of the South yesterday), but if you scroll through to the end of the Slate post, there’s a diagram laying out how the ornately carved ceiling of the chapel may actually read out as Chladni patterns, and therefore as a piece of music. I expect Dan Brown has already started writing his next installment. Meanwhile, check it out!

And here’s a neat demo of the phenomenon, if you’re unfamiliar:

Mind the Gap

Great performances have nothing to do with how many Facebook friends you have, but in today's cultural marketplace it can certainly feel that way. In the performing arts, we spend a lot of time obsessing over the hurdles we feel we need to overcome in order to connect performances with audiences. Age gaps. Genre gaps. Economic, social, and technological gaps. But are we trying to close the gaps we see by transforming our presentations, our marketing, and even our art in ways we haven't

Molly Sheridan

Molly Sheridan is a writer, editor, and producer specializing in classical and experimental music, with a focus on multimedia content designed for the web. A winner of ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Award for music journalism, she’s executive editor of NewMusicBox and CounterstreamRadio, both programs of New Music USA.

She hosted Carnegie Hall’s Sound Insights podcasts and online artist interviews and her writing has appeared in publications such as TimeOut, The Washington Post, and theÂ occasionalÂ concert program.Â She attended the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University, earning a bachelor’s in journalism with a specialization in violin performance and French in 1999.

She currently divides her time between New York City and Baltimore, where she lives with her husband, the saxophonist Brian Sacawa, and cooks for Wonderland Kitchen.