This Inca Building—the Only Surviving Structure of Its Kind—Might Have Been Designed to Amplify Sound and Music
Researchers will use 3D modeling to assess what the “carpa uasi” in Huaytará, Peru, originally looked like and how sound traveled through it
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The Peruvian town of Huaytará is home to a 15th-century Inca building that’s unusually simple for the civilization, which is known for its intricate architecture, like the structures seen across Machu Picchu. This building, in contrast, consists of three stone walls and an opening.
Now, researchers think they’ve discovered the reason for this design: The Inca may have built the structure with the express purpose of amplifying sound and music.
“We’re learning that sound was incredibly important from the earliest cities on, dating back several thousand years [B.C.E.],” says Stella Nair, an art historian at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a statement. “Builders were incredibly sophisticated with their aural architecture, and the Incas are one part of this long, sophisticated tradition of sonic engineering.”
The building is known as a carpa uasi, or “tent house,” a name that references its open-ended structure. It’s the only known surviving carpa uasi, as these constructions weren’t as structurally sound as other Inca buildings.
Did you know? The architecture of Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu is a 15th-century citadel that boasts approximately 200 structures, including residences, temples and warehouses.The structure survives today for a somewhat ironic reason: Spanish colonizers ordered that the Church of San Juan Bautista be built on top of the carpa uasi in the 16th century. Meant to override Inca cultural heritage, the church ended up providing the building with the stability it needed to endure for centuries.
Nair and her colleagues, a team of acoustic experts led by Stanford University’s Jonathan Berger, believe the structure was designed to amplify sound by funneling it to one end, creating a natural speaker of sorts. The Inca might have used the carpa uasi to project low-frequency sounds, like drums announcing the end of a battle.
In her 2015 book, At Home With the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space and Legacy at Chinchero, Nair noted that the carpa uasi’s walls aren’t placed at right angles. Instead, the open end is wider than the closed one, creating a trapezoidal shape. “This subtle widening of the structure at the open end allowed for greater visibility between the people inside and those outside the building,” Nair wrote—a helpful design choice if the structure was used as a gathering place.
Over the course of three weeks in the remote town of Huaytará, Nair and her colleagues studied the carpa uasi’s distinct architecture, taking measurements and photographs and creating drawings. Next, the researchers will use 3D modeling to approximate what the structure’s original roof looked like and generate a model of how sound would have traveled through the building.
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“Many people look at Inca architecture and are impressed with the stonework, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” says Nair, who studies Indigenous arts and is working on her third book about Andean architecture, in the statement.
“They were also concerned with the ephemeral, temporary and impermanent, and sound was one of those things,” she adds. “Sound was deeply valued and an incredibly important part of Andean and Inca architecture—so much so that the builders allowed some instability in this structure just because of its acoustic potential.”
At its height, the Inca Empire was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. By the time Spanish colonizers arrived in the early 16th century, the empire encompassed modern-day Peru; most of Chile; and swaths of Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia and Argentina. The Inca valued the arts and viewed architecture as the most important of them all.
“What the Incas did that was really smart is, rather than trying to make an architecture that alone is going to be impressive,” Nair tells History.com’s Tom Metcalfe, “they instead made an architecture that was in dialogue with the vast, impressive landscape.”
Because the Inca left behind such a wealth of complex, visually interesting structures, Nair says academics have sometimes overemphasized visual art in their scholarship about the empire.
“Sound studies are really critical, because we tend to emphasize the visual in how we understand the world around us, including our past,” Nair says in the UCLA statement. “But that’s not how we experience life—all of our senses are critical. So how we understand ourselves and our history changes if you put sound back into the conversation.”