RESEARCHERS at Stanford University have created “acoustic models” of some of the world’s best-known spiritual and historical sites, to explore the experience of transcendence hundreds or thousands of years ago. They include Renaissance churches in Italy, Egyptian tombs, and Inca temples.
The project, “Sound, space, and the aesthetics of the sublime”, is funded by the Templeton Foundation and led by Professor Jonathan Berger of Stanford University. He teaches composition and music theory at the university, and cognition at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
The team is exploring “how music interacts with visual perception of architectural space to engender a feeling of the transcendent; what aspect of the acoustics of sacred spaces induces spiritual feelings; and whether this is measurable or replicable.”
A project website poses the question: “Why do some of us, when certain music is played, and when we are in certain architectural structures, feel like we are in the presence of majesty, of something overpowering, awe inspiring, reverential? . . . Music is transitory, ephemeral, and intangible, it affects our aesthetic feeling. Architecture is voluminous, stationary, and material. At times, it alters our sense of relative size. Somehow, in their interplay, a sense of the spiritual sometimes emerges.”
The hypothesis being tested is that many sacred sites “create auditory impressions of size and volume that confound or contradict our visual impressions due to acoustic-visual interactions that subvert listeners’ abilities to localise sounds, to judge the distance from source to ear, to identify the number of signals that comprise a sound, and to unambiguously segment and discretize sound.
“The resulting sensory integration confusion can create a feeling of ethereality where space seems measureless, indefinite. When certain types of music are heard in these measureless spaces they may evoke a transcendent quality.”
To explore this hypothesis, a library of “virtual spaces” is being created, in which people’s reactions to hearing sound in them can be tested. Tests will also be conducted in physical spaces.
Several spaces are being recreated in virtual form. In one example, a recording of Dufay’s motet “Nuper rosarum flores”, composed for the consecration of the Florence Duomo, has been “auralised” in a virtual model of the cathedral to recreate its sound under the dome in 1436. Few such churches remain that have not been changed since they were built.
A virtual model of the Chauvet cave in France, which contains some of the world’s best-preserved cave paintings and was occupied about 37,000 years ago, has also been created, and used for a recreation of sound from the time, on instruments that mimic percussive tools from that era.
Several archaeologists have contacted the team to ask about the acoustics of the places that they are exploring, resulting in work in Egypt and Peru. One team member is exploring Islamic archaeology and acoustics in Turkey. The project also entails bringing performers in the virtual spaces that have been created, and seeing how they adapt their performance.
A final gathering of the whole research group is to be held in Stanford next year.
