ABSTRACT
Cistercian monasteries are spaces designed to be apart from the world. Isolated, enclosed, and operating according to a life code preaching work and prayer, they are archetypical of Michel Foucault’s Heterotopia: utopia rooted in reality. Places of silence, monasteries still harbour many sounds: the noise of activities and movement, nature sounds and liturgical ritual sounds. Indeed, this heterotopia is sequenced with various tones that organize monks’ daily life. Moreover, an abbey’s sound environment and its many effects seem closely related to (and even reveal) a variety of sensations of temporal duration, including occurrence, rupture, stretching and acceleration. This leads one to wonder how sounds are perceived and lived, and how they “build” the heterochrony of monasteries? Do they have sound profiles specific to monasteries and enough to remove them from secular time and raise them to the rank of sound heterotopias? Through sound simulations of three abbeys and application of heterotopic criteria, the chapter will show what makes monasteries heterotopias and the sound dimension’s role in this feature.
