ABSTRACT
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 fifteenth-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’ sets out to do.
Working closely with game developers, musicologists, architectural historians, and acousticians, the project aimed to recreate the sounds and sensations of early music performance in virtual reality. It 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, two virtual auditoria were constructed, 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, the recordings and virtual spaces were brought together using acoustic ray-tracing to recreate the sensations of hearing a historic performance, in its original performance space.
In this chapter, I seek to use this work as a gateway through which to link the discourses surrounding music in/and visual culture—how the decorations and materiality of a physical performance space are designed to (re)frame and contextualise the sounding art within them—with a broader understanding of the intellectual and cultural resonance of the ruin/fragment through what might be described as ‘affective medievalism’. Virtual reality (VR) is a medium which is to date extremely oculocentric, and one for which the contingencies of its presentation destabilise accepted notions of what it is to be realistic with sound. Ultimately, this chapter seeks to sketch a theoretical framework within which to approach the multimedia reconstruction of historical performances in virtual reality.
