How One Man Captured the Music of Jordan’s Desert

By Scoop Team On Oct 14, 2016

Ammar Khammesh tests flint stones in the Jordanian desert (screencap from 'Sound of the Desert')

Ammar Khammesh playing his 'Sound of the Desert' exhibit at Amman Design Week (screencap from 'Sound of the Desert') — Ammar Khammesh playing his ‘Sound of the Desert’ exhibit at Amman Design Week (screencap from ‘Sound of the Desert’)

We all know the desert has its own unique beauty, its own sounds, its own music. One man, however, has taken it a step further and brought the Sounds of the Desert to Amman Design Week.

The idea came to architect Ammar Khammash as he was driving across the Jordanian desert and heard the sound of the flint stones under his tires.

“The desert has its own melody, if you will,” he says in a short video produced by NBC (below). “Every rock is an instrument by itself.”

Ammar Khammesh tests flint stones in the Jordanian desert (screencap from 'Sound of the Desert') — Ammar Khammesh tests flint stones in the Jordanian desert (screencap from ‘Sound of the Desert’)

The stones, gathered from a 10m by 10m section of Jordan’s Badia, were formed in the Cretaceous period. Khammash, of Khammash Architects, used tuning apps to determine the pitches of the sounds the stones made and discovered that they fall into a chromatic scale.

“There’s a secret in every stone,” he says, “because every stone… has more than one note” depending upon where you play it.

Khammash, a 56-year-old Amman native, did not seek out certain notes but rather gathered stones randomly and took the sounds they gave him. “I don’t want to push the desert to say something which is not true,” he says. “I want to let the desert say its own verdict.”

The display was featured in Amman’s Design Week, which took place from Sept. 1-9.

See the project for yourself here:

WE SAID THIS: Have you ever tried something like this? We’d love to hear about it!