david/The Kukulkan Quetzal Chirp

The Mayan temple of Kukulkan is an ancient stepped pyramidal temple. The temple has the curious property that, if one stands in front of the temple at a certain distance and claps, the echoed clap sounds like a chirp. This chirp, some say, was specifically designed to mimic that of the Quetzal bird, which was revered by the Maya.

It has been proposed that the stepped pyramid acts as a Bragg grating, so that its reflective properties are frequency dependent. The delay in reflection of higher frequencies is assumed to lead to the chirp.

The goal of this project is to model this acoustic process directly, in order to understand the mechanism that produces the chirp, and to determine how it might have sounded when the pyramid was first constructed.

The project will involve the use of finite volume or finite difference methods for solution of the 3D acoustics equations in first order form. Adaptive mesh refinement will be used to reduce the computational cost of transporting high frequency waves over the required large domain. The goal will be to develop an interactive simulation in which a recorded clap is propagated and the echo is returned as output. This could be used as an interesting demo for the KAUST visualization lab.