Those Stone Age caves, especially the ones in the south of France, are not just remarkable for their famous paleolithic wall art. They have incredible acoustics — the kind of resonance and sustain that may have led cave dwellers to pick them out as ceremonial gathering places, even before they painted a thing on the walls.

Or so says a French specialist in building resonance, particularly the resonance of Romanesque churches. Says an American sound expert: “It’s possible that all of today’s music could have resulted from an ingrained human memory of the acoustical properties of caves.”