Jornada d'Estudis Doctorals del Departament d'Art i Musicologia

Imagine experiencing a musical moment from the past: a rich, sensory experience that combines the interplay of candlelight on beautiful devotional art, the exquisite performance of 15th -century sacred music, and the warm acoustics of a performance space that now no longer exists, all in immersive virtual reality. This is what the AHRC-funded ‘Space, Place, Sound, and Memory: Immersive Experiences of the Past’, set out to do. Working closely with game developers, musicologists, architectural historians, and acousticians, we aimed to recreate the sounds and sensations of early music performance in virtual reality. We began by painstakingly piecing together two historical performance contexts from fragmentary sources and records, and then recorded historically-informed performances in an anechoic chamber, a space that is specifically designed to have no natural acoustic. Once complete, we constructed two virtual auditoria, digitally rebuilding St. Cecilia's Hall and the Chapel at Linlithgow Palace from detailed laser scans taken on site, and then reconstructing plausible interiors from the historical and architectural record. Finally, we brought the recordings and virtual spaces together using acoustic ray-tracing to recreate the sensations of hearing a historic performance, in its original performance space. My talk today – which focuses primarily on the reconstruction of Linlithgow Palace, our VR experience, and the commercial CD we recorded based upon it - explains the processes that we went through and explains some of its outcomes. I will also contextualise our work within the broader academic and performance landscape, discussing questions relating to historically informed performance practice, immersion and flow, and the place of new technologies in historical research, education, and the cultural and heritage industries.

Presencial, Sala de Graus de la Facultat d'Economia i Empresa B3/012

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Inscripcions: Eduardo.Carrero@uab.cat