Soundspace

Dear Colleagues,

A team of senior and postdoctoral researchers participating in the ERC Advanced Grant project ‘How Processions Moved: Sound and Space in the Performance of Urban Ritual, c.1400-c.1700’ (HERC–ADG–2021, no.101054069 [SOUNDSPACE], PI: Dr Tess Knighton) proposes to publish a dedicated Special Issue of Arts based on the new concept of soundspace. Over the course of the project, the term ‘soundscape’, the ubiquitous umbrella noun developed by Murray Schafer in (Murray 1977) to refer to the sonic environment and adapted to urban musicology by (Reinhard Strohm 1985), has come to seem less useful. Originally derived from landscape, ‘soundscape’, along with several other cognates such as ‘sensoryscape’ and ‘sickscape’, retains an emphasis on the visual, suggesting an overview of the sounds of the city, which can be organized into categories (bells, trumpets, music of various kinds (written and inwritten), voices, natural sounds, animal sounds, etc.), without necessarily entering into the dynamic of the complex relationship between sound and space in the urban context. It is proposed that, rather than looking at different sounds and their social and political functions in isolation, sounds are seen to interact with the spaces and functions in which they were heard and interpreted. Our approach suggests that accessing past auditory experience cannot rely on recovering sounds alone; it requires including the practices through which people inhabited and sensed their worlds: how they moved through space, how they gathered, how they listened together, how they felt and how these practices structured collective life. In this sense, soundspace takes ideas suggested by Michel Certeau in his study of daily life (Michel 1984) as a starting-point, in which the paths that were created and connected to the spaces and buildings of the city were forged by daily activities relating to trade, family and institutional connections and consolidated by the establishing of networks among those different entities and through ritual practice. The value of recovering and interpreting historical soundspaces lies not only in a better understanding of the past—how communities inhabited their sensory surroundings through soundscape—but also in recognising that practices of listening are cultural and historical. Barry Truax’s concepts of ‘acoustic community’ and ‘soundscape competence’ (Truax 2017) are particularly useful here and can be successfully adapted to the historical past and placed into dialogue with the emotional community (Rosenwein 2006) and the notion of habituated emotional practice (Scheer 2012).

This proposal represents a radical departure from the accepted use of ‘soundscape’. Furthermore, a keynote paper concerning the concept of and methodologies related to ‘soundspace’ was recently presented by the PI and Antonio Arnieri at the international conference ‘The Historical Ear: What is Auditory History?’, organised in Paris, 18–21 March 2026, by the International Musicological Study Group ‘Auditory History’ to considerable acclaim.

The purpose of the Special Issue is to present both the theoretical framework and the resulting methodological approaches of the new concept of soundspace, with a chronological scope that covers three centuries of ritual practice (c.1400-c.1700) in four Mediterranean cities: Barcelona, Valencia, Tarragona and Palma de Mallorca. The concept of ‘soundspace’ will be applied to case studies in urban ritual in the form of processions of various kinds—penitential, rogative and festive—based on new or revisited archival research undertaken in the course of the ERC SOUNDSPACE project. Articles will be presented by the PI, Senior Researcher and four postdoctoral researchers, who have been working on the project since 2023 and who have debated the concept of soundspace during that period. The material presented is highly original and will complement the existing literature relating to historical sound studies, urban musicology and urban ritual through its innovatory concept and new methodologies, in the combination of digital cartography, restitution of historic spaces, acoustic modelling and analysis of sensory and emotional discourses, adopting an interdisciplinary approach (history of art and architecture, history of the senses and the emotions, musicology and ethnomusicology, historical sound studies and philology). It will encourage a reconsideration of the somewhat indiscriminate use of the notion of soundscape and provide a framework for deeper historical and cultural analysis of the dynamic interaction between sound and space.

It should be noted that for this Special Issue, the six contributors would be drawn from the SOUNDSPACE research team, since we are the only scholars so far to have developed and applied the soundspace concept. Following the Paris Auditory History conference, it might be possible to add one or two more contributors, but ideally, the editors feel strongly that in this particular case, it would be important to prioritise the researchers who have been actively involved in the formation of the new concept. It might be a good idea to invite another scholar, outside the research team, to provide an introduction, or possibly a summary, of the ideas and behind the concept and how it has been applied to historical material; possibly, for example, Niall Atkinson (who was at the Paris conference).

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200–400 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editors (email: tknighton@icrea.cat). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

References

Michel Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).

Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977)

Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is that What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotions’, History and Theory, 52/1 (2012), 193–220.

Reinhard Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

Barry Truax, ‘Acoustic Space, Community, and Virtual Soundscapes’, in The Routledge Companion, M. Cobussen, V. Meelberg, & B. Truax, eds, (New York & London: Routledge, 2017), 253–263.

Prof. Dr. Tess Knighton
Guest Editor

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• soundspace
• soundscape
• urban musicology
• sound studies
• history of emotions
• history of the senses
• affective geography
• sound studies