Seeing the Sounds The following is the Torahs awe-inspiring description of theophany at Mount Sinai: And it came to pass on the third day, in the morning, that there was thunder and lightning and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of a horn exceeding loud; and all the people that were in the camp trembled... Now Mount Sinai was completely on smoke, because G-d descended upon it in fire; and its smoke ascended like that of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked greatly. And the voice of the horn waxed louder and louder... And G-d spoke all these words, saying... I am the Lord your G-d... And all the people saw the sounds, and the lightning, and the voice of the horn, and the mountain smoking. (Exodus 19-20) According to the Talmud, the words: All the people saw the sounds, mean that the Israelites actually saw the sounds of the Ten Commandments; that is, each word spoken by G-d took the form of letters that pierced the sky like lightening. Exactly what form did those letters take? The ancient Kabbalistic text, Sefer ha-Yetzirah, discusses the spiritual significance of the Hebrew alphabet. In contrast to man-made letters, which are merely conventional, the Hebrew alphabet is considered to have been given by the Creator, and represents profound spiritual forces - in modern terms, different energies that flow through each letter. For example, the letters of G-ds command: Let there be light - vayehi ohr actually conveyand bring into being the infinite varieties of light found in creation: from the visible to the invisible, from the spiritual to the manifest. Although the Talmudic Sages disagree upon which script was used to write the Torah given at Sinai, the Kabbalists clearly state that it was the same script used today in writing a Torah scroll - the square Hebrew lettering known as the Ashuri (Assyrian) script. According to Kabbalists, this name has nothing to do with the Assyrian Empire, but derives from the shape of the letters, which are a confirmation (ishur in Hebrew) of their inner meanings, and bestow happiness (osher) upon those who can penetrate their secrets. In our time, two Israeli scientists - Chayim Yaakov Guggenheim and Chayim Ben-Harav-Chai Elbeze - have each made an amazing discovery that illuminates the shape and sound of the Hebrew letters. Chayim Yaakov Guggenheim is an electro-optics engineer at Aircraft Industries of Israel. He was part of the team that developed the Lavi fighter jet. When he came across the statement of the Sages above, it sparked in him an idea. Today, sophisticated instruments can transform sound waves into images that can be displayed on a computer monitor. Guggenheim wondered if it was possible to use these instruments to display, in tangible form, the ancient Jewish understanding that the sound of letters actually correspond to their shape. Guggenheim was initially skeptical, particularly in view of the fact that our present-day pronunciation of a number of letters differs from the original spoken Hebrew. Despite his skepticism, and much to his amazement, he discovered that the sound waves for seventeen out of twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet create an on-screen image very similar to the shape of the written letter itself. What follows is a translation of an article written by Guggenheim, which describes the way in which the experiment was performed, its reliability in scientific terms, and the conclusion he draws. All the People Saw the Sounds - How? Yaakov Guggenheim, engineer How is it possible to see sounds? The technical challenge When I saw the verse in Exodus: And all the people saw the sounds... I asked myself how it was possible to see the sounds, and what did the People of Israel actually see at Mount Sinai? According to Rashi: They saw the audible. If so, is must be possible to convert sound waves into an image. The first idea was to find the relationship between the audible frequencies (20 Hz-20 kHz) and the much higher, visible frequencies of color detected by the human eye, at wavelengths from 0.35 micron (violet) to 0.75 micron (red), which encompass all the colors of the spectrum. According to one commentator, the Kli Yakar. The People of Israel saw the letters. In other words, G-ds words were grasped as visible letters of the alphabet. Therefore, our conversion must retain the letters graphic forms, such as for example, the round shape of the fifteenth letter samech is written in an entirely different way. However, the Talmud contains a difference of opinion as to which script was used (BT Sanhedrin 21b). One of the opinions claims that the Torah was given in the ancient Hebrew script, but after the return from the Babylonian exile, the change was made to the Ashuri script. The other opinion claims that the Torah was given in Ashuri script and relates the word ashuri to the Hebrew word for honesty - yashurut. That original script was lost over time and replaced by the ancient Hebrew script. With the return to the Land of Israel from Babylon, the original Ashuri script was rediscovered and used to write the scrolls of the Law. This script is in use to this day. In addition, for the experiment to succeed, the shapes of the letters must appear as images when spoken. This means that they must appear from right to left, asi n Hebrew. Thus, the graphic timeline must also flow from right to left as the letters appear on the computer monitor. Through a microphone, sounds are expressed as changes in electrical current or voltage along a timeline. The graph here displays the spoken letter ayin as it appears on an oscilloscope. While it shows how far we are from discerning the shape of the letter ayin, it nevertheless points to the marvelous nature of this invention. Further investigation revealed the complexity required for the frequency conversion; for converting sound to image requires an additional dimension. Whereas an image is two-dimensional, as shown by the graph, the sound develops along a timeline (time being the third dimension - ZC). Even if we say that the sound is also two-dimensional - a flow along the Y-axis relative to time along the X-axis, the image must still be three-dimensional;
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 21:09:00 +0000
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