Those who live or frequent deserts have had the chance to hear a distant melody that is produced by the desert sands. This phenomenon is already mentioned in the Middle Eastern literature of the fifth century and in Chinese treatises of the same time, always considered as a supernatural event. It was the British engineer and explorer Ralph Alger Bagnold (1896-1990) who first scientifically described what he called the song of the sands in his treatise The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes (1941).
The melody appears in the dunes and can be of two types. The sharpest, which is known as whispering, is associated with the sands of the dunes of the beaches and barely lasts a second; and the most serious and impressive, occurs in the desert dunes. The sound appears during the formation of the dune , which grows by the sand grains brought by the wind. When the mound reaches a certain height and inclination, the most superficial grains begin to collapse and, when they rub against each other, they emit a sound.
