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.
