Man has worshipped the Gods of Bass ever since the beginning of time. In the days before the pyramides, when there were no cities and no agriculture, the best places for bass worship were caves. Because caves are the ready-made dub studios of mother nature.
Caves can have extreme acoustics, which is just what you need for ancient bass worship. In Malta, for example, dub scientists have detected a strong double resonance frequency at 70Hz and 114Hz inside a 5,000-years-old mortuary temple. The delay time in this cave is up to 8 seconds. In other words: it's a perfect place for deep, droning ritual chants. Listening to sustained sounds from the lowest range of the human voice (70 – 130 hz) will produce altered states of consciousness, allowing direct communication with the Gods of Bass.
And of course, conspiracy buffs believe this cave to be an entrance to an underground alien base.
One of the dub scientists who researched the Maltese cave said that "the Oracle Chamber ceiling, especially near its entrance from the outer area, and the elongated inner chamber itself, appear to be intentionally carved into the form of a wave guide."
Oldskool acoustic treatment
Exploiting the combined effects of sound, light and hallucinatory drugs, some ancient civilizations have built rich multi-media dub temples. Miriam Kolar, a dub scientist at Stanford University, has been studying the 3,000 year-old Chavin culture in the high plains of Peru. Kolar and her colleagues have been mapping a maze of underground tunnels, drains and hallways with very strange echoes.
"The structures could be physically disorienting and the acoustic environment is very different than the natural world," according to Kolar. The mazes at Chavin de Huantar also include air ducts that use sunlight to produce distorted shadows of the maze's human participants. And sound waves from giant marine shells produced a frequency that actually rattled ancient eyeballs.
And at Chichen Itza’s Temple of Kukulkan, dub scientist David Lubman found a 'chirped echo' built into it's acoustics. This flanged echo sounds like the quetzal, the bird messenger of the Maya gods.
In ancient times, dub fx like weird echoes and deep bass drones were associated with the sacred: from prehistoric caves in France and Spain to musical stone temples in India; from the Eleusinian Mysteries and sanctuaries in Greece to sacred Elamite valleys in Iran.