Credit: Fritz
et al., doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abe9510
Recordings of this ancient conch shell transformed into a horn provide a time capsule into what sounds it was able to emit, tones that turned out to be in close proximity to the musical notes C, D and C sharp. These sonorous notes were extracted by a musicologist recruited by the researchers, who used a modern metal mouthpiece and blew into the shell’s customized opening.
“I needed a lot of air to maintain the sound,” said Jean-Michel Court, who performed the demonstration.
According to a new open-access study published last week in Science Advances, the remarkable shell is a large specimen of C. lampas, a mollusk heralding from the North-East Atlantic and the North Sea. Today, it can be found in Ireland and France (Brittany, Pas-de-Calais) at its northern borders. Although rare, it still lives in the Bay of Biscay and Basque and Asturian coasts of Spain.