AURAL CULTURE: DECODING THE SACRED SOUNDSCAPES OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE

Project Information

CULT-AURAL

Grant agreement ID: 101064323

DOI

10.3030/101064323

Project closed

EC signature date 26 October 2022

Start date 1 July 2023

End date 31 July 2025

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 181 152,96

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CULT-AURAL (AURAL CULTURE: DECODING THE SACRED SOUNDSCAPES OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2025-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In medieval Europe, Christian monasteries shaped sacred landscapes not only through architecture and art but also through sound. Bells and other large percussion instruments, such as semantra and matraca, resounded across valleys and mountain slopes, structuring daily rhythms and linking monastic communities with their wider surroundings. These sounds marked the hours of prayer, summoned congregations, and announced significant events. More than functional signals, they carried multiple meanings, blending local traditions with Christian liturgy and fostering an authentic aural culture that influenced how people perceived sacred landscapes.

Despite their central role in medieval life, monastic soundscapes have been largely overlooked in scholarship. The CULT-AURAL project broke new ground as the first systematic and comparative study of these sound environments, demonstrating their importance for Europe’s auditory culture. In doing so, the project not only advanced academic understanding but also reached wider audiences by reviving and rethinking the medieval soundscapes through lectures and public engagement activities.

CULT-AURAL was conceived as a training-through-research project that opened a new research frontier: medieval aural culture as a driver of cohesion and identity. Using case studies from Catalonia, Norway, and Serbia—three contrasting regions that preserve medieval monastic settings in both Catholic and Orthodox traditions—the project pursued three objectives: (1) to analyze medieval monastic sacred soundscapes through systematic acoustic fieldwork, (2) to explore how sound contributed to local identity and social cohesion, and (3) to examine the role of gender in shaping the experience of monastic soundscapes.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The cornerstone of CULT-AURAL was extensive fieldwork, combining advanced training in acoustic methods with independent data collection. Initial training took place with the ERC Artsoundscapes team at Es Culleram site (Ibiza, 2023), after which fieldwork was carried out in Catalonia, Norway, and Serbia.

• Catalonia: acoustic measurements were taken of bells in the Pallars Sobirà region (Santa Maria de Gerri, Santa Maria d’Àneu, Sant Pere de les Maleses, Sant Pere de Burgal, Sant Andreu de Pujol), and of two large wooden matracas at Santa Maria de Ripoll and Santa Maria de Cervera. The study of bell sound propagation at Santa Maria d’Àneu was published in Studia Universitatis Hereditati.
• Norway: fieldwork in the Valdres region documented 12 medieval bells (Slidredomen, Lomen, Reinli, Hegge, Hedalen), with a study on sonic heritage and comparative tonal analysis published in Heritage.
• Serbia: acoustic data were collected on bells and semantra at five sites on Mount Kosmaj (Monasteries Pavlovac, Tresije, Kasteljan, and the churches in Babe and Nemenikuće).

In 2024, the secondment at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, was completed. It was highly productive and fully aligned with the MSCA program’s goals of fostering interdisciplinary training and international cooperation, carried out with a clear focus, strong institutional support, and concrete outcomes in research, dissemination, and future collaboration. I participated in a thematic workshop and gave three invited talks, contributing to academic exchange and increasing the visibility of the CULT-AURAL project. A manuscript I prepared during the secondment was later published in the open-access scientific journal Studia Universitatis Hereditati, becoming the first scientific article from the CULT-AURAL project and meeting a key public dissemination objective. Additionally, I formed a new collaboration with the editorial team of Metode journal after my essay proposal was selected in a competitive contest for Volume 4, 'Exhibition as Method.' This collaboration is ongoing and involves four workshops scheduled from summer to fall 2025, connecting ten of fifty-five selected researchers worldwide and leading to the publication of Volume 4 of Metode journal. During the secondment, the fieldwork in the Valdres region was undertaken, performing acoustic measurements of medieval bells and studying the soundscapes of sacred sites—activities that directly support the core goals of the CULT-AURAL project by advancing methods for sonic heritage research. The resulting scientific article based on this fieldwork is published in September 2025 in the open-access Heritage scientific journal (Q1).

The CULT-AURAL project also had a strong impact through conferences and editorial initiatives. I co-organized sessions at the European Association of Archaeologists (Rome, 2024; Belgrade, 2025) and edited a Special Issue of Studia Universitatis Hereditati. In 2025, I co-organized the international conference Resonances of the Past: Archaeomusicological Research in Catalonia at the Museum of Music in Barcelona. Tirant lo Blanch will publish a co-edited volume arising from this conference.

CULT-AURAL further raised visibility through invited lectures and roundtables in Europe and beyond, including the roundtable Sound and Spac: A Multidisciplinary Roundtable organized by the International Musicology Society’s Auditory History Study Group (2025), ERC-funded projects Artsoundscapes and SenSArt seminars in Barcelona (2023) and Padua (2024), and Junior Research Seminars at the Institute of Archaeology in Barcelona (2025). International dissemination also included presentations at the IX Coloquio Internacional de Musicología (Bogotá, 2024), Collegium Medievale (Oslo, 2024), and a workshop at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo (2024). Project results were presented at major international conferences such as MedRen (Granada, 2024), the XVII Symposium of the ICTMD Study Group on Music Archaeology (Valladolid, 2024), and the European Association of Archaeologists (Rome, 2024; Belgrade, 2025). Altogether, these activities consolidated CULT-AURAL’s role as a reference point for medieval sonic heritage and sacred soundscape research.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The publications and outputs of the CULT-AURAL project, both completed and forthcoming, advance knowledge well beyond the current state of the art. A key achievement is the study of medieval bells from the Valdres region of Norway, published in the Special Issue The Past Has Ears: Archaeoacoustics and Acoustic Heritage (ed. Brian Katz) of the open-access journal Heritage (doi: 10.3390/heritage8090359). This is the first work to analyze a corpus of medieval bells using acoustic methods, providing unprecedented insights into their sonic heritage and raising new questions about historical practices of bell tuning.

Another innovative contribution is the soundscape study of Santa Maria d’Àneu (Catalonia), published in the Special Issue (eds. Zorana Đorđević, Zrinka Mileusnić, Jasmina Ćirić, and Xavier Costa Badia) of the open-access journal Studia Universitatis Hereditati (doi: 10.26493/2350-5443.12(2)65-84). By combining acoustic propagation analysis with visibility studies, this article demonstrates how interdisciplinary methods can clarify the historical significance of sacred sites even in the absence of documentary sources.

Several further peer-reviewed publications are in press. An edited volume (eds. Margarita Diaz Andreu, Miquel Lopez Garcia, and Zorana Đorđević) with Tirant lo Blanch, stemming from a conference I co-organized, includes my chapter on the sonic heritage of Catalan matracas—large wooden percussion instruments sounded from bell towers during Holy Week, when bells remain silent. This represents the first comparative acoustic study of two distinct constructions of matracas, specifically those at Santa Maria de Ripoll and Santa Maria de Cervera. Another forthcoming chapter, to appear in Medieval and Early Modern Soundscapes (ed. Ascensión Mazuela Anguita, published by Boydell & Brewer), explores how large percussion instruments contributed to the sacralization of landscapes in medieval Europe. Finally, the fieldwork data and GIS-based sound mapping led to a reassessment of bell audibility across distances, opening new perspectives on gendered experiences of sound. This research forms the basis of an article currently in preparation, presenting results from listening tests of medieval bell sounds.

Taken together, these studies establish new methodologies for the study of medieval auditory culture by integrating acoustic measurement, spatial analysis, and cultural interpretation. CULT-AURAL thereby provides a foundation for future interdisciplinary research on medieval soundscapes and sonic heritage, demonstrating its relevance for both academic scholarship and broader heritage discourses.

Acoustic measurements of the medieval bell sounds at Hedalen stave church site in Norway