Digital Humanities in the Historical Soundscape Research: Sounds of 18th Century Naples The Acoustics of Ancient Theatres 6-8 July 2022 Verona, Italy (original) (raw)
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Digital humanities in the historical soundscape research: sound of eighteenth century Naples
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The historical soundscape is a timely research topic and arouses interest in the fields like history, architectural acoustics and urban musicology. While the approaches in these disciplines are diversified in themselves, the latest phenomenon of digital humanities suggests more holistic attitudes to the subject. Can these novel digital methods help us to give a satisfying answer to the popular questions of sound history? How might the past have sounded, or is it possible to hear past sounds? This study tries to show that problems like lack of adequate historical evidence or poor quality of digital reconstructions are likely to be solved at a certain level with the advancing digital humanities technologies. A brief review of the available digital humanities methods that can be applied to the historic soundscape research is provided. It uses natural language processing, digital mapping, acoustic modelling, and extended reality techniques to trace the soundscape of 18 th century Naples.
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Soundscape is the technical term used to describe the sound in our surroundings. Experiencing Historical Soundscapes allows for a better understanding of life in the past and provides clues on the evolution of a community. Interactive and multimedia-based Historical Soundscape environments with geolocation is a relatively unexplored area but, recently, this topic has started to call the attention of researchers due to its relevance in culture and history. This work is part of the PASEV project, which is developing several types of digital tools, designed to interactively share the Historical Soundscapes of the Portuguese City of Evora. This paper presents an initial domain requirements analysis for the interactive and multimedia-based Historical Soundscapes domain, which involves handling geolocations. Thus, projects in this domain, such as PASEV, can be part, and take advantage of the benefits of this work, which is the reuse of Soundscape domain requirements, reducing the time needed to develop applications in such domain.
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Audioscan Milano explores the strategies and experiments in the field of sound and noise of Milan’s legendary Studio di Fonologia Musicale. A multimedia installation composed of hundreds of field recordings of the city of Milan, Audioscan Milano provides its audience with a multisensory experience of the urban soundscape and the opportunity to interact with it digitally. The manipulation of noise and its transformation into musical sound via sophisticated electronic equipment emulates the Studio’s audio techniques but also exposes the reasons behind its failure to attract a wider audience. Visitors to Audioscan Milano expect to hear urban noise rather than musical sounds and, despite some enthusiasm around being able to mix sound objects on the map and move them around the room, they fail to appreciate the technical subtleties of the procedures behind the music. Ultimately, Audioscan Milano constitutes an important link to Italy’s musical heritage of the 1950s and 1960s and can learn from its limitations, particularly when it comes to engaging the audience to play a more active role in the auditory experience of the city.