This Inca Building was the Original Boom Box

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Iimagine the sound a gymnasium-sized boom box could produce, the rumble and clank of its music echoing across the mountain peaks.

About 600 years ago, the Inca order of Tupac Yupanqui built a stone hall in the Peruvian Andes, in a town named Huaytará, perched about 10,000 feet above sea level. Unlike most other Inca buildings, which typically had enclosed floor plans, this one was totally open on one end. The feature, researchers say, was likely intended to amplify low-frequency sounds, such as drumbeats used to announce the start or end of a battle, thereby injecting music into the ancient world.

“Many people look at Inca architecture and are impressed by the masonry, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Stella Nair, an associate professor of art history at UCLA who specializes in indigenous arts and architecture of the Americas, said in a statement. “They were also concerned with the ephemeral, the temporary and the impermanent, and sound was one of those things.”

The opening at one end of the 30-foot-long temple would have concentrated the sound produced inside the hall and projected it into the environment more effectively and with greater clarity and range than an enclosed space, Nair said. His research suggests that this feature was not simply an aesthetic whim or a sign that the building was unfinished, but a feat of acoustic engineering. Because the temple has only three walls, it deserves its name carpa uasi in the indigenous Quechua language, which translates to “tent house” in English. The building is believed to have served as a temple for worshiping the sun or as a palace.

Ironically, Nair said, the temple probably survived because Spanish colonizers ordered a Catholic church built on top of it, a common practice in the 16th century.^th century. The three-sided layout would have made the temple much less architecturally stable, but the temple still today forms the foundation of the Church of San Juan Bautista, Huaytará’s main tourist attraction.

To probe the building’s sonic properties, Nair is working with a team of acoustics experts led by Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford University. Together, the researchers hope to produce a model of how sound would have passed through and left the building. For his research, Nair took photographs, measured the building and made drawings. She will use these drawings in combination with AI modeling to try to get an idea of ​​the shape of the original roof, which was removed when the church walls were built.

Nair says his findings suggest that the ritual and social role of sound should be reconsidered in other pre-Columbian Andean architectures. His research is part of a growing field of study known as archaeoacoustics, which aims to add the critical layer of sound to historical interpretation.

Whatever these acoustic archaeologists learn could tell us a lot about the kind of music that resonated in the valleys and mountains where cultures thrived centuries ago.

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Main photo: Stella Nair

• Kristen French

  Published on October 24, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and editing features and news for publications such as Wired, Rear channel, The edgeAnd new York magazine, among others. She studied science journalism at Columbia University. She is based in San Diego.