Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SOUNDSPACE (How Processions Moved: Sound and Space in the Performance of Urban Ritual, c.1400–c.1700)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2025-02-28
The overall objective of the interdisciplinary SOUNDSPACE project is to understand the impact of urban ritual – in particular, processions – in the late medieval and early modern periods on the inhabitants of a city. Processions have been studied from various political, cultural and religious perspectives, but they have rarely been analysed for their dynamic elements as performance, as events that were enacted in time and space and which involved bodily movement. To go beyond the established descriptive and representational approaches, SOUNDSPACE project braids together three main strands of research, each of which will be developed through the use of digital humanities tools. The objective of the first strand is to create a virtual reconstruction of a particular kind of rogative procession through deep archival research into every aspect of the spaces through which the processions passed, and the sounds that were heard, using VR technology to recreate the sense of movement and of passing time. Modelling of all spatial features, together with acoustic recuperation of those spaces, will result in a digitally inflected research that goes well beyond traditional approaches to shed light on the processes that lay behind the performance of processions. The second research strand uses techniques of digital cartography to track processional routes and to create a sense of the density of processional performance over the course of each year and so to gauge the extent of the experience of processions among the inhabitants of the city and hence their impact on urban daily life. The spatial–temporal dimension will be analysed to understand the significance of processions for those participating in or observing them. Dynamic visualisations created using ArcGIS will help to present the results. The multivalent meanings communicated through the performance of processions are analysed further in the third strand, which aims to identify and study the discourses relating to processions through the lens of sensorial and emotional engagement. A corpus of written evidence of many kinds will be contextualised and interrogated through text-mining and discourse analysis tools to elucidate the interpretative processes generated by discourses associated in the collective memory with the different elements of the processions, the spaces through which they passed and the soundscape they produced. These three interlinked approaches will result in a multi-dimensional insight into the workings and impact of processions on the urban community in question. All types of procession in four Mediterranean cities–Barcelona, Tarragona, Valencia and Palma de Mallorca–will be studied to compare processional practices during the period c.1400–c.1700. Historians of many kinds–cultural, of art, architecture, music, religion, liturgy, daily life, society and literature–as well as DH technical experts are brought together as a research team in order to be able to fulfil these objectives.
The first two years of the SOUNDSPACE project have involved consolidation of its structure and working practice: the ten members of the interdisciplinary research team were appointed during2023, and include historians of music, art, architecture, liturgy and religion as well as experts in sound studies and ethnomusicology. The project database was built as a repository and analytical tool for the archival research that is being carried out in the Mediterranean cities of Barcelona, Tarragona, Valencia and Palma de Mallorca. This archival data forms the backbone to the three research strands that run through the project and enables the use of DH tools for analysis and presentation of results. The acoustic restitution of the sounds and spaces experienced through the three days of litany processions in Valencia in 1527 in order to understand the dynamic between sound and space in movement and time (Line 1) has been developed through two field trips to Valencia. The processional spaces to be modelled through LIDAR scanning, drones and photogrammetry have been identified and captured in 3D in preparation for the second phase of auralisation. Storyboarding of the moments to be used for this recreation of a processional event is in progress. Tools of digital cartography are being used to analyse the reach and density of processional experience in the mapping of itineraries and identification of hubs of activity (Line 2). Analysis of processional routes in relation to time is in process. A discourse analysis tool is being developed using machine learning to identify and interrogate the sensory and emotional discourses that inform the processional experience and lend it significance for participants, observers and the city as a whole (Line 3). The tagging of a corpus of a variety of texts in a way that allows the triangulation of emotional, sensory and sonic competence according to the tacit knowledge shared by those present to help understand the impact of processional performance. This approach will result in a form of historical ethnography relating to processional practice and enable a deeper insight into the role of civic religion in the communication of the urban community’s social structure and sense of identity.
Although the interim results from the first two years of the project inevitably represent work in progress, it is clear that there is a strong likelihood that research in all three strands will go beyond the state of the art. The field work undertaken in Valencia for the acoustic restitution of the litany processions has focused on enabling the movement of the procession, and the resulting acoustic change as it moved from interior to exterior or from enclosed to open spaces, to be realised through Virtual Reality and interactive onscreen modes. This sense of movement and shift in aural perspective pushes at the boundaries of the technology and the results will go beyond existing recreations in which the liturgy or procession is presented as a series of static moments and/or without auralisation of the sonic experience. The interrogation of how those involved in the procession perceived sound and what it communicated from different spatial and acoustic perspectives can only be achieved by going beyond existing models. The use of digital cartography tools to understand the ways in which the texturology of the city was spatialised through processional practice has so far focused on the mapping of the hundreds of processions that took place over the course of a year. The results from the mapping of the processional calendar of the smaller city of Tarragona have already shown that the tacit knowledge formed by collective memory continued to inform the significance these rituals held for the urban community in terms of both space and sound. The main hub of processional activity in Tarragona is positioned on the site of the ancient Roman forum. Visualisation of these results in a readily legible way is also a challenge to the state of the art here. The tool of discourse analysis currently being developed is still in an experimental phase. Full development of this tool of advanced textual analysis may need to undergo proof of concept.