Photo by Leeds Teaching Hospitals / Leeds Museums and Galleries
Sound is often a thing lost to ancient history. It’s not easy to recreate the songs of a pagan ritual or the clash of a titanic Bronze Age war, but with the help of computerized tomography (CT) , scientists are recreating the sounds buried deep in the past.
Scientists from the Royal Holloway-University of London used CT scans to create a 3D model of a 3,000-year-old mummy’s vocal tract. The mummy, Nesyamun, lived during the reign of Ramses XI (1107-1078 BCE) and worked at a temple in Thebes along the Nile. Today, he’s more commonly known as the Leeds Mummy, named after London's Leeds City Museum where it's on display. Science reports he “likely sang and spoke to the gods as part of his ritual duties.”
According to D.M. Howard, professor of electrical engineering at Royal Holloway-University of London, and lead author of a paper published in Scientific Reports, the voice reconstruction was made possible by measuring “the precise dimensions of [Nesyamun’s] extant vocal tract following (CT) scanning.”
The researchers noted that Nesyamun’s vocal tract soft tissue was “reasonably intact”—which is more common in mummified corpses. This level of preservation helped scientists create the 3D model. There was, however, a caveat; given the available soft tissue, the researchers were only able to synthesize what Nesyamun’s voice sounded like when pronouncing a vowel.
“This acoustic output is for the single sound for the extant vocal tract shape; it does not provide a basis for synthesizing running speech,” according to the paper.
Once researchers had the 3D model, they used a speaker in conjunction with an instrument called a Vocal Tract Organ to hear what Nesyamun had to say. The sound bite of the was in the range of what the vowels in the words ‘bed’ and ‘bad’ sound like. Additionally, the paper notes that the sound produced by the 3D model and Vocal Tract Organ was a direct result of Nesyamun’s posture—which in this case is his burial position.
As an orator, Nesyamun likely delivered liturgies from a standing position, so his voice would have been louder and his body position would have also affected the timbre, resonance, and volume of his speech.
Considering Nesyamun’s profession, he likely won’t mind his voice being heard thousands of years after his death.