DOI: https://doi.org/10.58874/SAAT.2022.172
Abstract: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 18th century Naples.
Keywords:historical soundscape, digital humanities, virtual acoustics
Pages:173-176
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