It’s not time travel: sound modeling of 1622 St Paul’s (10/31/24)

1625 Woodcut of St Paul's (from Wall 2014)

Wall, John. “Recovering Lost Acoustic Spaces: St. Paul's Cathedral and Paul's Churchyard in 1622.” Digital Studies / Le champ numérique 3.3 (2014). https://www.digitalstudies.org/article/id/7245/

Sound modeling offers powerful insights about the past, but it’s not time travel. We can tell important things about our past and query our assumptions about it, but we never get to recreate an exact experience of what “really” happened. 

The NEH-funded Virtual Paul’s Cross project focuses on sermons as performance by examining sound as a component of the sermon experience. Using architectural modeling and acoustic simulation, they take a specific sermon from November 5th, 1622 – delivered by John Donne – and explore its sound signature. 

One of the key questions is “the audibility of a sermon delivered without amplification in a large open space for people positioned at different places in the crowd” – a question interesting for my own work on graveside ceremonies. Relying on a full team (“architects, visual and acoustic modellers, linguists, actors, recording engineers, and historians and literary scholars”) they put together a simulation – the fun part of scholarly productivity! http://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu

Their assessment of the world of John Donne comes with important caveats: 

The purpose of digital modelling is not to give direct access to a world that is forever lost to us, but to enable us to organise and experience in new ways the data that come to us from the past and to evaluate from new perspectives both the scope and limitations of our understanding of that data. The outcome of a project using digital modelling is not an exercise in time travel… They are instead constructions based on interpretations of existing data 

That distance from the experience is one I have thought about as I have climbed hills surrounding churches of interest for my own work; without the pastoral provisions of the 15th century, how much even of topographically-shaped work is reflective (a carefully chosen pun!) of the soundworld my communities might have experienced? Since pasture and forest and field each have their own acoustic signature, the modern mix and familiar pathways of a 21st century hiker cannot replicate the historical past. But perhaps there are elements that DO point towards experience – rounding the corner with that glacially-deposited boulder is going to change the church-bell ring. 

In short, I agree with the authors that we use these replicated experiences “to reconceptualise the subject of our study, re-evaluate the usefulness of our existing approaches, and reconsider the kinds of questions we bring to the discussion.” Models help us think better. 

 (And I could use help thinking, for sure!) 

The St Paul’s team has the benefit of a treasure-trove of visual evidence, largely absent for those of us working at the level of town or country, and the authors have paid careful attention to the relative authority of various evidence types. And, since architecture has implied acoustics, they can move from visual parameters to acoustic models. Here, they follow Vorlander (2009), Longair and Boren (2010), and, expecially, Howard and Moretti (2010) on early modern church practices. 

As they note, large crowds, banners, and tapestries on festive occasions increased acoustic absorption. The practices of religion shaped the acoustics of religion, with impacts both on reverb and on musical clarity. 

After explaining why they chose their space-- the north east corner of the churchyard – the authors explain the ambient noises under consideration and the crowd sizes that they used in their modeling. 

They also give details about the kinds of things that the models “do” for them. They ask: What coheres (and what does not)? What assumptions are WE bringing to our experience? In part, the model becomes a useful filter for understanding our data – and even more importantly, its limits. 

One thing I’m noting just for my future attention: the authors distinguish between “representative rather than specific examples” – the absence of a detailed diary entry means that the generic category supplies information for the site that would not be available from the data inherent to the site itself. Thus, the ambient noise is representative randomly occurring sounds. (A background of silence would obviously have been inauthentic.) 

The discussion of their visual modeling is definitely worth a read https://www.digitalstudies.org/article/id/7245/, but here I’m just going to mention a few things about their sound model: 

1. an accurate model depends on 3 things; the space’s dimensions, the various disrupting forms (“geometric forms”) that are present there, and the materials of which they’re made 
2. in particular, they had to consider the materials of the space: stone, wood, plaster, brick, dirt, and the bodies and clothing of the congregation. This matters in my graveyard ceremony discussions, since so many material goods are mentioned as part and parcel of the ceremony itself. 
3. their model revealed that sound reflections from the buildings SIGNIFICANTLY amplified the speech – it would still be audible 140 feet or more away, instead of dying out at the 96 ft mark. 
4. the ambient noise is, they estimate, 35 Db – far less than the 45 Db of the modern urban environment 
5. bell-based pauses probably have remnants in the text, since a before and after would be necessary to stitch the performance across the bell-peal hole. That’s a really interesting stylistic feature and probably applicable to other kinds of texts as well! 
6. One has to imagine the voice, but a strong and measured cadence would be most effective given crowd size (and public expectation) 

As we are less than a week out from the anniversary of the Gunpowder Day sermon, I thought now a good time to review the process that the group took to a plausible reconstruction of Donne’s sermon as planned. 

But there’s one last twist to share: As every good hiker knows, outdoor delivery of program is beholden to the weather gods, and they did not smile on that Tuesday back in 1622. After all the planning (and reconstruction), that particular sermon had to be moved indoors as the storms rolled through. And that’s the kind of thing that REALLY mucks with your model!

Scoring for Calm or for Excitement? Smalley et al. (2023) on choices of sound in digital nature experiences (10/25/24)

I’m lucky enough to live on a farm, so wandering around in nature is something that comes as a matter of course for me, but I’m interested in how “digital nature” fits into the modern soundscapes we inhabit, and came across the Smalley et al. article while looking for a different reference. It was an interesting read, so here’s my summary!

Great Egret in a Florida waterway

Alexander J. Smalley et al., “Soundscapes, music, and memories: Exploring the factors that influence emotional responses to virtual nature content,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 89 (2023): #102060, https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1787215/FULLTEXT01.pdf

The idea of visiting nature in a digital environment is popular, and was doubly so during the period of shelter-at-home recommendations during the first outbreak of the COVID pandemic. During that time, the authors of Smalley et al.’s “Soundscapes, music, and memories” got the idea of testing how the digital delivery of nature was actually working in terms of its emotional deliverables: cognitive reset, restorative potential calm, excitement, and awe. (They cite Kaplan & Kaplan 1989 on attention restoration theory, and Ulrich et al. 1991 on stress recovery theory as influences on their thinking). They had n=7636 participants, so provide a robust quantitative assessment of the field.

They noted that while we’ve done a lot of work to understand how viewing nature works, we’ve done less to understand how hearing such nature-scapes works in that digitally mediated environment, and they developed a clever plan to test the parameters that matter, using four different audio setups: silence, only music, only nature sounds, and a combination of music and nature sounds.

Since most documentaries have historically relied on big bold orchestral scores, they commissioned a “wall-of-sound” score (à la Hans Zimmer) to accompany their 3-minute digitally-generated nature scene, and (in collaboration with BBC Soundscapes for Wellbeing) measured the video’s impact with and without natural sounds layered in. (The natural sounds included things like bird song, water sounds, and the like.)

They were also interested in memory and its intersection with “affective outcomes triggered by digital nature content,” but noted that nostalgia (more particularly), being so often tied to specific musical cues, may not have been operational, given the newly generated score.

They found that:

The inclusion of music in our scene was associated with greater feelings of excitement (where it was the highest rated condition for this outcome), lower levels of calmness, and no significant change in restorative potential, awe, or nostalgia, compared to the silent control.

Music, in other words, is doing something, but it is not actually doing the restorative work of nature. To create excitement, we may be seeing “rhythmic entrainment” – the body responding to the upbeat rhythms of the music – and/or “emotional contagion,” in which the listener identifies with “the energy and excitement expressed by the music.”

But, since music meets only one of the positive parameters that “nature videos” can head for, the authors emphasize “the importance of multi-sensory depictions of nature.” Restoration and reset, and even awe at the beauty of the world, are supported by the hearing of the sounds that surround it.

My take-away is that video with nature sounds is the best choice if you’re trying to invoke a state of calm and get ready for another round of writing (ha!), but nature with music is better if you need that energy boost to clean the house.

The Silence of Not-Writing – and What To Do About It (10/20/24)

To actively "not write" is an awful thing. Sure, my kitchen has never been cleaner, and my bathtub sparkles, but inside, I’m sinking. Each moment that the words don’t come feels like another part of me shriveling up, reduced to silence.

As this awful feeling and I have become friends over the years, I’ve developed some strategies for what some people call #WritersBlock. Perhaps one or another of these approaches will work for you. In hopes that they’re useful, I present:

STRATEGIES TO START THE WRITING PROCESS

The junk mail trick	"To whom am I talking?"	Go for a walk	Scrub the tub
The bullet point approach	Jump a section	Whiteboard it	Put in the time
Colored inks	Write to Cousin Tim	Poster paper	Move to the slide-deck version
The Pomodoro	Don't finish	The business card approach	Brown noise
Why it's not working	Don't write: dictate	Read more	Small chunky bits

 

The junk mail trick:

A big blank piece of paper is scary. Halloween haunted house levels of scary. This might help:

I used old envelopes from the junk mail pile to write my MA thesis. Turn it at an angle, and you have to write one word, then three words, then 6 words, then the full sentence....

Then after half an hour I'd type it in and it would be a paragraph or two

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The bullet point approach:

Everyone always tells me to outline first. But me? I don't know what I'm going to say until I write it.

So I don't outline; I just take 10 minutes and try to get out 20 bullet points. I'll use about 7 of them. It’s like scribbling on a napkin – low stakes, and the end product can be discarded at will.

Honestly, this often gives me 2-3 paragraphs worth of evidence and thoughts about them – and editing from something is always easier than starting from zero

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Colored inks:

I take 10 different pens -- different textures and colors. I lay them out. I set a timer for 3 minutes, choose a pen, and write a sentence with that color/texture. Then 3 minutes and another color/texture. Then 3 minutes and... my brain has taken over and I'm writing stuff so I stick with that pen for a while. But it gets me over the hurdle. And a ball point and a felt tip pen write different kinds of words, a weird but true fact (for me)

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The Pomodoro:

Sometimes the problem is trying to write too much. Trying to write a paper? Impossible. Trying to write the next paragraph? That’s at least dwelling in the realm of possibilities.

So: set a pomodoro (named after the timer): 5 minutes for planning, 25 minutes for writing on THAT ONE THING. Paragraph 2 of section 7, or whatever.

Don't worry about the whole of it, worry about the next thing to do.

Also, I sometimes do this in sets in a group setting ("writing retreat") -- we all log in and share our plan, then do 3 pomodoros with 10 minutes between. That's some sweet writing, and a celebration at the end

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Why it's not working

I take 30 minutes and list all the reasons it's not working. I don't know enough about X, I hate my topic, the fridge needs cleaning, all those thousands of reasons that the writing isn't coming together. Then I pick a fixable one and work on that for 15 minutes.

I often get farther in those 15 minutes than in the previous day, TBH

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"To whom am I talking?"

Set aside the content of your project and brainstorm the people in your world. With whom are you engaged -- whose work is driving your thinking right now, who do you hope picks up your book/article, who do you want to overwrite so that the TRUTH is seen, and so on.

Then, revisit your outline or bullet point list to see WHERE you're going to talk to them, and explain something for your favorite imagined reader in words they'd understand

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Jump a section

Okay, this part isn't ready to be written. So put in a placeholder and jump to a section that's going to go rip-roaringly fast. That part where you deconstruct someone's argument and explain it from a different perspective. The part where you're describing your data and just have to get that down on page. The part where you justify your methodology

Progress doesn't have to be linear, it just has to be progress

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Write to Cousin Tim

Sometimes it helps to spend a writing session explaining your project to an outsider. This is what I'm doing, this is why I'm doing it, this is how it's frustrating, this is how it's going to be so cool when it's done. I often draft an email to my Cousin Tim. (Sometimes I even send it – with a front-end explanation of getting over the stuck-ness. Groove on your weird, right?)

Then lift whatever sentences are ready, and turn other things into bullet points

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Don't finish

This is one from the "how to write" lit: Leave yourself mid-thought at the end of the day.

I'm terrible at this, but it's a great concept. You end your writing session with the question or thought mid-formulated, so when you sit down tomorrow it's easy to pick up the thread.

My best solution on this is to end the day with an all caps question for the next day: WHY DOES THIS DATA SUGGEST XXXX and then when I log in I just have to answer that question.

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Don't write: dictate

I do this one a TON: I do a really rough outline (half-page at most) for a chapter or a section, playing around with the order until it makes sense.

Then I pick up a voice recorder (Hello, cellphone) and I dictate the "lecture" in 5 minute chunks. Then I type it up and edit it.

I've found that larger (e.g. 45 minute) chunks are harder to work with, but in principle it's just the "talk It out" that's important here.

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Go for a walk

I'm a walker. I pose myself a problem, and go for a 2 mile walk. At the end of the first half-mile, I've usually got a paragraph. At the midpoint, I may need to pull off the trail, sit down and throw a bunch of stuff onto the paper. I almost always make at least one critically important connection or have a significant insight.

(You can combine this with dictation, but I've found that for me walking and writing are a better match for large-scale progress)

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Whiteboard it

There's something uniquely satisfying about standing at a whiteboard with colored markers making it make sense. So do that. And then keep working the details, and then the explanation for those details, until you're looking for the fine-tip marker and a spare bit of space, at which point it's probably time to capture all that writing on the computer.

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Poster-paper brain-dump

Poster paper

Get a giant piece of paper -- butcherblock paper or those poster paper things -- and tape them up in your hallway.

Use those to do a brain dump. I do associative outlining in a kind of spider-web diagrammish sort of way, but I also have random blocks of "this is in there too"

I might layer that with what have I read / what do I need to read

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The business card approach

This is the opposite of butcher paper: go small. One thought per card. I used up most of a box of old business cards on this a couple of articles ago -- each idea goes on a card, and I went as FAST as I could go. I might do 7 on a topic (go fast) and then switch to some other aspect of the content (go fast), and then... I did 3 separate sessions of making cards, and then sorted them out like a sunflower with its petals.

Then I typed it up and wrote transitions. I should do this again; I made such AMAZING progress

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Read more

This one is risky, b/c there's always more to read. But, sometimes I need a better overview of the topic than I've got activated, so I do the spreadsheet reading approach -- what's my literature? What gap was each author trying to fill? what methods did they use? What evidence do they have that I want, what findings did they make that make me feel strongly. What 3 quotes might I use from this.

I highlight what I want to be sure to cite, & write from there

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Scrub the tub

This may be everyone's favorite standby for writer’s block, but hear me out. Sometimes, following up on that urge to avoid gives you time for the ideas to gel. Scrubbing the bathtub or organizing the cabinets IS part of the writing process

But set the bargain in advance, and follow through:

Okay, I'll scrub the tub. But then I'm going to write 5 sentences. Or bullet point. Or stand at my whiteboard for 5 min

It's not a lot, but remember the adage:

Little by little, and sooner or later it all gets done

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Put in the time

Sometimes, you just have to sit with it not coming quickly. A lot of how-to-write advice is about word count, and as a counting type person that speaks to my itch.

But in reality, it's the time with the project that is making the difference. Whether it's a 10-minute session or a half-day, try to USE the time you've got as best you can. Measure important progress: I connected this idea with that one and now I need to explain that = progress

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Move to the slide-deck version

Most of us work in a slide-deck world, where our prose needs a visual accompaniment in some formats, and not in others. If your prose for the narrative version gets stuck, flip to the slide-deck and use visualization to outline the section. Is this section 4 slides or 5? What images will it use? What will you say about them? Oh wait, that’s prose. Now move it back to your narrative and adjust the text with that necessary shift of style

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Brown noise

Is your busy-beaver brain in the way of thinking about this current project? Turn on some brown noise (like white noise, but deeper, and a bit more irregular). It rumbles, and gives visceral me something to do so that prose-generating me can actually tend to task instead of checking in on that other layer of thought (I prefer brown noise to music, since when music is going I invariably wind up listening too actively to it -- bad for generating prose!)

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Small chunky bits

My last thought for today is that it's okay for writing to be in the in-betweens. I have written a paragraph standing in line at the grocery store, dictated the transition to the next section while waiting at the stoplight, run in from weeding the garden to make note of those three examples which are perfect for section 7. All of that is writing, even though it's not that "scholar sitting at the desk" approach that my advisor used. Just write. You'll get there.

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My take-away:

Writing isn’t always about grand revelations or hours of uninterrupted work. Sometimes it’s those small, in-between moments that add up. It’s the thinking that you do when you’re doing other things. (Why is it that the BEST ideas come to us in the shower? When you’re deep in the throes of a project, have a pen and pad EVERYWHERE so you capture the bits that help with the session tomorrow!)

In other words, your goal isn’t to write the whole thing, it’s to build momentum by writing the next thing. Whether you're outlining the chapter or just scribbling notes on the back of a receipt, trust that the process is working.

The words will come, and when they do, the silence will feel like a distant memory.