Building for the Ear (from Chaco Canyon to Medieval Vorarlberg) (2/23/25)

An image of Chaco Canyon ruins from 2012

Note: The current blog post is in dialog with Primeau and Witt (2018), and draws on my own wanderings through Vorarlberg during summer 2024 and on Herbert Kaufmann’s Sakrale Kunst und Kulturstätten to understand Vorarlberg church placement.

Primeau and Witt’s study of “Soundscapes in the Past” asks “how people heard in their wider surroundings,” and answer the question in part with GIS measures. Their insight is that landscape matters and consider significant the “location of features within the built environment and performance spaces” (875).  They use the term “soundshed” – akin to watershed – to capture the way in which sound carries or is disrupted by the topographical features of a place.

They center their study on the rich archaeological site at Chaco Canyon, proposing that the Chacoan builders utilized terrain and topography as acoustical elements in their planning. They suggest that “certain features may have been placed at their locations so individuals may have heard events occurring elsewhere” (p. 875). In other words, the Chaco Canyon residents built with an eye (an ear?) toward the soundshed that surrounded them, choosing building locations and orienting openings to best use the acoustical features of a resonant landscape.

Primeau and Witt acknowledge the embodied nature of hearing, but importantly point out that larger elements in the local environment can shape these embodied perceptions. As Tilley (2008) has shown, surfaces, inclinations, textures and other elements can reduce or amplify sound. Given the nature of a canyon environment, echoic and non-echoic surfaces abound, both as elements of the built environment and of the natural surroundings.

The stark nature of Chaco Canyon’s building ruins of mud-brick and stone (shown in Figure 1 in the left-hand column) might historically have been softened by furs and fabrics, and almost certainly had sound-absorbing storage or even people – in other words by surfaces with less resonance than the  present day. The landscape too with its swales and swells, the hills and cliffs, and even the plant life each contribute in positive and negative ways to noise propagation, particularly at distance.

  Four Views of Chaco Canyon, July 2012

Primeau and Witt  believe, with Hamilton and Whitehouse (2006) that there can be an effective and measurable distance for interactions including speaking and shouting. Their newer methodology, however, seeks to establish more objective parameters than merely personal experience. They propose SPreAD: a System for the Prediction of Acoustic Detectability.

They observe that there are various element at play, distance attenuation being only one. Sound source height plays into sound’s ability to carry, as does the atmospheric absorption loss, which varies by temperature and humidity. Nevertheless, they assert that “Like visibility, audibility can be an actively managed aspect of the built environment, and one can question the relationship between sound and site in the landscape.”

For them, the presence of ceremonial sites on higher locations had significance, for it might mean the audibility of a ceremony’s start or end by individuals elsewhere in the Canyon community. Events in one place were meant to be experienced by individuals in another, they argue, and topographical placement support that.

For a medieval monastic historian, their conch shell examples were readily translated into the positioning of churches in Austria’s Vorarlberg. Such churches had a marked preference for locations on the hills that jutted up out of the local landscape; it is the rare church indeed that lacks a view (or that can be visited without a hike or a climb!). The inventory in Kaufmann (n.d.) makes the point effective: in image after image, it is easy to get a photo of the church from down below (as it were), because they are so frequently higher than the surrounding neighborhood. This can be confirmed in person; wear good walking shoes if you want to climb to see the building in person.

The parish church of St Nikolaus in Damuls, for instance, is on a hill; if it were waterside, we’d describe its placement as on a promontory:

  Damuls -- church of St Nikolaus: image July 2024

Already more prominent than the surrounding landscape, the position of the bells for Vorarlberg churches were even further elevated through built bell towers, typically added in the 13th to the 17th centuries. Elevation proves to be even more important than central location; many of the central churches of my study are several blocks away from the heart of the medieval “downtown,” such as it was. Clearly, the acoustical benefits of being high, along with the defensible ones, made these locations prime real-estate from the perspective of church communications. Neighbors near and far could readily hear the ringing of bells for starts or ends of service – along with weather warnings or peals of other sorts (war, arrival, general announcements). This meant that the topographical benefits of height outweighed the inconveniences of a further walk or an uphill climb. Just as at Chaco Canyon, events in one place in medieval Vorarlberg were meant to be experienced by individuals somewhat distant, and, again like Chaco Canyon, the topographical placement of churches and their bells support that.

Primeau and Witt’s study reinforces the idea that sound is not just a byproduct of environment but an actively shaped and managed aspect of spatial experience. Their concept of the “soundshed” and the methodology of SPreAD provide tools for assessing how people in the past may have structured their auditory worlds with intention—whether for ceremony, communication, or social cohesion.

Applying this framework to medieval churches in the Vorarlberg highlights how different cultures have used elevation to project sound across landscapes. These parallels suggest that sound, like sight, was a crucial factor in how such historical spaces were designed and experienced. Soundshed and soundscape design mattered as much to the late medieval church-planner as to the Chacoan builder some three centuries earlier. Both actively sought to manage audibility as an element of their built environment. Building for the ear in this way reminds us that sound was never incidental—it was an integral part of how people of the past shaped and experienced their worlds.

WORKS CITED:
Hamilton, Sue, Ruth Whitehouse, Keri Brown, Pamela Combes, Edward Herring, and Mike Seager Thomas. “Phenomenology in Practice: Towards a Methodology for a ‘Subjective’ Approach.” European Journal of Archaeology 9, no. 1 (2006): 31–71.

Kaufmann, Herbert, ed. Sakrale Kunst und Kulturstätten: Landesausgabe Vorarlberg. Innsbruck: Süd-West-Presseverlag, n.d.

Primeau, Kristy, and David E. Witt.“Soundscapes in the Past: Investigating Sound at the Landscape Level.” Journal of Archaeological Science Reports 19 (2018): 875-885.

Summer’s Soundscape Research--by the Numbers (10/6/24)

Sampling of frescoes, St Nikolaus, Ludesch, Vorarlberg, Austria

My summer’s research was focused on Thalbach, a women’s convent of “devoted sisters” founded in 1336 in Bregenz, Vorarlberg, Austria. I was working on the women’s soundscapes, for the sisters were involved in town ceremonies and had lively -- and acoustically active lives inside their convent as well. I was in Austria, mostly, though with side trips to a number of countries. 

Research included frescoes and artworks, along with the standard array of manuscripts and incunabula (early prints), documents (so many documents) and a certain amount of standing around in cemeteries waiting for bells to ring. No, really. 

I drafted up my “account” of “summer successes” as a bit of a joke (yay, count all the things!) and then, unjokingly, fell silent as I went through a month (ugh!) of viral bronchitis. 

Here, rather belatedly, is my assessment of a summer of delightful research on soundscapes in Vorarlberg, Austria. 

1.1 million steps. That’s actually only an average of 7.3 miles a day. But it's still a lot.

16,677 photos. Mostly of documents, manuscripts, and books, but also some absolutely stunning scenery. Best hike: the Rappenlochschlucht outside of Dornbirn, Vorarlberg– a moss-bedecked gorge hike, noted for its wooden walkways hooked into the canyon sides. Waterfalls, a natural bridge, forest, and serenity: it was a great way to start a day! 

The Rappenlochschlucht, Dornbirn, Austria--zigging and zagging back through the gorge...

125 “Akten” – archival folders – across 21 boxes. Kind of like going through your great-aunt’s attic; the box may be labeled but you’re never quite sure what you’re going to find. Best find of the summer: a book-list from a local farmer who paid his taxes with books rather than with cash. The sisters were so happy with his books that they waived the third round of taxes that year! 

108 manuscripts and early prints.This was the core of my research. These materials are undigitized, and a number of the books had readers’ marks so you could see what the nuns had found interesting. My favorites were of two types. In one, books were bound by recycling old unwanted manuscripts – this means I could see physical evidence of 14th and 15th century liturgical practices in Thalbach, exactly what I had hoped to find! And the other type were the ones with illustrations; I admit that opening a book and discovering it had pictures – some of them colored! -- was one of the great joys of the trip.

Museum Exhibitions I have loved, Summer 2024 version

25 museums in 6 countries. Altarpieces, artwork, and three fantastic special exhibits. “Wir, Schwestern” (We, sisters) was on nuns and the book arts, and another was on the scriptorium at Reichenau, and a third was on Hans Holbein the Elder, Hans Burgkmair, and Albrecht Dürer. 12 abbeys and monasteries In addition to Thalbach itself, this included the Swiss monasteries of Grimmenstein and Wonnenstein, both of which were interconnected with the Bregenz monasteries in reform practices. 

8 churches with 15th c. frescoes. This was the special treat of my trip. These churches had full or partial programs of illustrations with sacred content – saints; judgment day; the life of Jesus; the life of Mary; and various builders’ marks and early modern graffiti. There were a number of visual parallels to illustrations in the Sisters’ books. And there’s nothing like standing in a church listening to the church bells and looking at the visual reminders of religious practices of the past to make the content of one’s research come to life. 

Random and planned events. And yes, I accidentally attended the inauguration ceremonies in Bratislava, Slovenia; talked church politics with a nonagenarian Swiss school-teacher outside the Bischofszell city hall; shared travel advice with a Czech pilgrim who is walking the long version of the Camino de Santiago; and had breakfast with Blair alumni in Vienna. Plus, there were the innumerable coffees and conversations with librarians and archivists, historians, curators, musicologists, composers, performers, and friends. 

TL/DR: Summer research success for me boils down to the “four P’s”: paper, parchment, pictures, and people.