Moravian Soundscapes. Sarah Justina Eyerly
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to explore new experiential and interpretive frameworks for understanding past soundscapes. However, it perhaps goes without saying that there were inherent challenges involved in this idea of reconstructed and experiential soundscapes, not least of which was the problem of how exactly to represent acoustic environments that no longer existed.65 In the case of the sound maps created for the Moravian Soundscapes website, we turned to the work of electronic composers and sound designers for inspiration. Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp’s “imaginary soundscapes” or “virtual or simulated soundscapes” became the framing methodology for creating the sounded portions of the project.66 In their work as electronic composers, both Truax and Westerkamp have simulated past acoustic environments through “soundscape compositions” created from digitally layered field recordings or prerecorded sound samples, generating what Truax has termed a “representation of acoustic environments.”67
In the case of our sound maps, we created soundscape compositions from field recordings of available industrial and agricultural machinery recorded in Bethlehem. Some of the hymns that are layered into the soundscapes are also field recordings. Other hymns, and the Mohican and German dialogues and sermons that are also represented on the website, were recorded in a studio. However, since the soundscapes of Bethlehem itself have changed dramatically since the eighteenth century, we also used digitally sampled environmental and historical sounds from the sound libraries of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). These sound libraries were originally recorded by BBC recording engineers for film and radio broadcasts, and represent the soundscapes of various natural places and communities around the world. Of particular interest for our purposes was the BBC sound libraries’ “Industrial Sounds” collection that preserves the sounds of rare historic machines and tools such as a wooden lathe, a double-handled wood saw, and even a butter churn. Each sound file was available as a 16/44.1kHz stereo audio sample, and multitrack editing of these samples into soundscape compositions facilitated the recreation of the Moravians’ acoustic environments. The end result was a series of historically informed electronic compositions that provided a descriptive sense of historic acoustic environments.68
For researchers interested in historic sound, soundscape compositions offer a model for reconstructing past soundscapes that simulate a coherent sense of an acoustic environment, even if formulated through the historical imagination of a composer. Both soundscape compositions and the performance or recording of past musical repertories stem from the desire to “sound” or to recreate historic aural experiences from an informed and academically rigorous perspective. Like other modes of historical performance, soundscape compositions are modern experiences and can only speculatively represent historical audible phenomena. Just as we can’t know exactly how a particular musical tradition was articulated by practitioners in the past, we can still strive to create modern renderings that are informed and informative.
What can we learn from re-sounding past acoustic environments? What are the advantages or disadvantages of such historical recreations? What insights do we stand to gain from the spatial humanities and sound mapping? In the case of Moravian Soundscapes, GIS technologies and sound mapping have been invaluable research methodologies in creating both the book and the maps. They have allowed me to more accurately convey the inherent emphasis in Moravian communities on sound, and sound maps have allowed me to directly, rather than abstractly, represent the sounds of places such as Bethlehem. They have also helped me to articulate the often intangible and elusive qualities of the Moravians’ sounded religious spaces and musical traditions. This has been especially important in my attempts to represent Moravians’ spiritual understandings of sound. According to composer Isobel Anderson, sound maps are particularly useful for mapping the “in-between spaces” of culture and society—the imagined and invisible relationships that constitute human experience of sound in the past and present.69 Moravian communities existed as much in sound as they did in space. This type of spiritual understanding of sound is certainly not unique to the Moravians. But as scholars studying religious traditions of music, we are often tasked with representing conceptions of sound and space that are imaginative, theoretical, and spiritual. In our attempts to document the soundways of religious communities, we often discover that ideas about sound are more important than the sounds themselves. Sound maps are just one way we might more deeply explore the sensory and imaginative aspects of religious traditions and communities, whether historical or contemporary.
Sensory data and knowledge can also be an important part of the research process itself. Since my background is in musical performance, my approach to historical research on music and sound has been greatly influenced by musicologist Elisabeth Le Guin’s theory of applied musicology—the idea that there is a form of embodied knowledge gained through the physicality of playing an instrument or singing.70 So I wondered if there could be a similarly embodied form of knowledge to be gained from “sounding” historical acoustic environments. Sound certainly has a direct relationship to emotion, memory, and instinct. Sensitivity to vibration is found in even the most primitive of life forms, and our brains have evolved over millennia to respond to acoustic signals and patterns.71 If acoustic knowledge is fundamental to our experiences of the world, then research processes and methods of historical inquiry that take advantage of the acoustical properties of sound might impart embodied forms of knowledge that deepen our understanding of historical times and places.72 In writing this book and composing the sound maps, I wanted to use my training as an academic and as a musician to imagine past soundscapes. I wanted to be a storyteller—a composer of both words and sounds. I have especially been inspired and drawn courage from Craig Womack’s assertion that history should be dreamed and imagined, and that we are called as historians (and musicians) to create stories that are compelling and rich:
History means very little until we develop a relationship with it that in this cyberage we might call “interactive” . . . I am talking about more than developing a capacity to empathize with people from our pasts. This has to do with placing ourselves inside their stories, becoming participants in history, more specifically, turning ourselves into characters in a story. History must be dreamed. It has to be authored. It must be turned into a fiction before it can ever be true. . . . This is the responsibility of any human being who desires an ethical relationship to her past. History is a vision quest, the quintessential religious experience. How else, if not through vision, can we access these experiences from the past so we may also experience them? This is how we approach the paradox we are up against. How can we ever know what experience is in its original forms, apart from mediation, interpretations, our perceptions? We cannot. Reality may exist with or without us, but whatever we can know is affected by our thoughts, no matter how spiritual the message. But we can imagine the places where experiences originate.73
The book and the website are intended to be imaginative frameworks for Moravian places and experiences. They represent the journey that I have undertaken as author to understand how sound intersected with Moravian ideas of space, community, and spirituality. They also represent the journey that my collaborators and I undertook to understand Moravian places. And they represent the journey that you, as reader, might take. In digital and physical space, whether in person or by imagination, you might journey beyond the page, participating in these narratives out on the land in the places where these histories were shaped.74 When you stand in these places, listen to the sounds around you. Imagine the layers of history underneath your feet, the traces and clues that previous generations have bequeathed us: names, stories, musical instruments, iron tools and wooden looms, buildings of stone and wood, and dug-out places in the earth. These are the sites of collective memory, of histories and soundscapes embedded in place. When we experience them in that way, we add our own stories, we add our own sounds.
Notes
1. Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, “Lied bey den Liebesmahlen,” Herrnhuter Gesangbuch (HG) Hymn 1340, verse 14. Hymn composed for the return voyage of a mission ship from St. Thomas in 1739.
2. Throughout this book, I have chosen to use “Mohican” rather than “Mahican.” While most ethnohistorians and anthropologists prefer “Mahican” because it is close