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!