Reproduction of the acoustic effect of the Kukulkan pyramid by delay effect in DAW

Abstract

The Mayan city of Chichen Itza is full of legends and mysticism. There, in the temple of Kukulkan, in front of a great pyramid with 91 central staircases, an interesting physical-acoustic phenomenon occurs that has fed mythical stories attributed to the Mayas. When clapping your hands in front of the steps, the echo sounds very different from the sound emitted: The echo presents a ‘tonality’ that resembles a kind of bird chirping (chirp) which is said to be the response of the Quetzal, sacred bird of the Mayas. Earlier work has discussed the convolution method to find a simulation of the spectrum of the echo sound captured at Kukulkan. In this article we are going to present an analysis of the reflected sound using the wave superposition method, and thus obtain a sound with musical ‘Pitch’ as a result of the superposition of multiple reflections of a percussive sound, using the AUDACITY audio software, as demonstrated in the supplementary material.