TY - JOUR
T1 - Presenting Archaeoacoustics Results Using Multimedia and VR Technologies
AU - Till, Rupert
N1 - Funding Information:
Funding information: This research was supported by funding from Arts and Humanities Research Council and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the United Kingdom Heritage Science Research Development Grant “Songs of the Caves” (Project Reference AH/K00607X/1); Culture Program of the European Union funded European Music Archaeology Project and the University of Huddersfield UK Music and Music Technology Subject Area Impact Funding. The Open Access status of this article has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 787842).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter.
PY - 2023/12/22
Y1 - 2023/12/22
N2 - Music and sound cannot be experienced through writing and numbers. Writing freezes time onto paper; as a time-based medium, sound cannot be heard without temporal motion, and acoustic metrics are silent data. For a complete experience of sound, it needs to engage our bodies. Digital multimedia technologies offer powerful approaches to understanding the acoustics of the past, and this work will explore a number of those affordances. In particular, this work explores the use of apps that illustrate archaeoacoustic effects, set digitally within visual and acoustic archaeological cultures. The ways of immersing audiences through projection, acoustic simulation, field and studio recordings, and musical performance will be discussed. The use of virtual reality (VR) headsets is explored to create a sense of deep-flow and presence amongst audiences, total immersion in an experiential phenomenological understanding of interacting audio and visual fields, as well as setting such results within an appropriate context. This study will examine how acoustics results at caves in Northern Spain, in various phases of Stonehenge, and at Paphos Theatre (all World Heritage Sites) can be explored using VR and multimedia technologies, evaluating the comparative advantages of the use of different technologies. It proposes that such integration of visual and sonic modelling using interactive digital technologies is effective as a nonrepresentational theory approach to compliment empirical studies, allowing understanding that goes beyond numerical analysis and binary dialectics to engage directly with the material of archaeological sites in an embodied manner, and address the real-world complexities of acoustic ecologies and their contexts.
AB - Music and sound cannot be experienced through writing and numbers. Writing freezes time onto paper; as a time-based medium, sound cannot be heard without temporal motion, and acoustic metrics are silent data. For a complete experience of sound, it needs to engage our bodies. Digital multimedia technologies offer powerful approaches to understanding the acoustics of the past, and this work will explore a number of those affordances. In particular, this work explores the use of apps that illustrate archaeoacoustic effects, set digitally within visual and acoustic archaeological cultures. The ways of immersing audiences through projection, acoustic simulation, field and studio recordings, and musical performance will be discussed. The use of virtual reality (VR) headsets is explored to create a sense of deep-flow and presence amongst audiences, total immersion in an experiential phenomenological understanding of interacting audio and visual fields, as well as setting such results within an appropriate context. This study will examine how acoustics results at caves in Northern Spain, in various phases of Stonehenge, and at Paphos Theatre (all World Heritage Sites) can be explored using VR and multimedia technologies, evaluating the comparative advantages of the use of different technologies. It proposes that such integration of visual and sonic modelling using interactive digital technologies is effective as a nonrepresentational theory approach to compliment empirical studies, allowing understanding that goes beyond numerical analysis and binary dialectics to engage directly with the material of archaeological sites in an embodied manner, and address the real-world complexities of acoustic ecologies and their contexts.
KW - acoustics
KW - immersion
KW - music archaeology
KW - presence
KW - virtual reality
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85181685320&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1515/opar-2022-0340
DO - 10.1515/opar-2022-0340
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85181685320
VL - 9
JO - Open Archaeology
JF - Open Archaeology
SN - 2300-6560
IS - 1
M1 - 20220340
ER -