Textile architecture has shaped the history of sound, yet the relationship between acoustics and textile histories remains underexplored in archaeoacoustics and related fields due to the overwhelming archival absence of these fluid, built environments. Although many projects are now beginning to collect acoustic snapshots of historical architectural spaces, the data collected in these studies can only provide reverberation times (RT) and subsequent convolution reverbs that reflect the space as it is today. These do not factor in archival absences or physical additions that have adapted historical spaces’ sound texture over time. However, this data collection is an important archiving practice, and further holds the potential to create theoretical models that can account for missing archival materials like textile architectures and other less durable spatial dividers.
I hope to expand the concept of the “dressed body” with this talk by exploring how textile installations shape the interior tissue of the human body through their material impact on soundscapes with a case study of the Abbey Church at Conques. Bodies physically respond to textile environments. The sounding, hearing, touching, and seeing body are greatly impacted by textile architectures. These shape sensory processing and response by altering the soundscape, shifting the shape of the speaking or singing body, and the perception of listening bodies.
Any room which has been stripped of dampening materials, such as tapestries, will have a longer rate of sound decay, resulting in a wet, “boomier” environment and less aural coherence. The presentation of historical spaces as echoing caverns with sharp reflective walls is a misperception, perpetuated in the historiography, by the absence of historical textile installations. Thus, modern listeners have been “earconed” into associating the sacred with this sound texture. Textiles created, segmented, and connected soundscapes, resulting in complex sound ecologies that transformed social interaction in medieval sacred spaces, from the muffled triforium to the clarity of a crisp, insulated nave.
Today, textiles frequently undergo organoleptic analysis for touch and sight, but historical textiles have never been the subject of taxonomic acoustic testing. Thus, there is no “Scoville scale” to easily classify woven textiles’ sound absorption. This is a first, necessary step toward creating simulated models of historical soundscapes. To date, most studies of textiles’ sound responsiveness focus on unwoven fibrous materials, as these studies are being conducted from within a contemporary sound engineering framework.
Through examining the extant textiles associated with the Abbey church of Conques and combining my data (RT 5.38 in sung vocal range) with that published by Stanford (RT 5.42 in sung vocal range), this talk will rethink the previous absence of textiles in historical sound studies. Conques, Toulouse, and Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges all incorporated textile architectures in arcades. I will discuss extant textiles in relation to the few organoleptic tests on woven structures and similar fibrous materials and will present a theoretical model for how these specific textiles may have altered the texture of sound at Conques, shaping bodily devotional responses in the space.
Key words:
Soundscape, sound studies, textiles, medieval art, archaeoacoustics, textile architectures
Barry Blesser and Linda Ruth Salter develop the term “earcon” in “Spaces Speak, are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture,” in The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933, MIT Press, 2002, p. 5.
Ariane Dor and Nadège François, « La restauration des textiles (protégés) monuments historiques en Midi-Pyrénées, bilan et perspectives, » Patrimoines du Sud, 6, 2017.
For the Stanford team RT data see: Bissera Pentcheva, AudioVision in the Middle Ages: Sainte-Foy at Conques, Santa Cruz: Community Printers, 2023, distributed by Stanford University Press. Also see the recently published analysis by Pentcheva, "The Choros of the Stars: Image, Chant, and Imagination at Ste. Foy at Conques," In From Words to Space: Textual Sources for Reconstructing and Understanding Medieval Sacred Spaces. Edited by Elisabetta Scirocco and Sible de Blauuw. Rome: Bibliotheca Hertziana, (2023) pp. 125-58.
Jonathan Sterne, "Sonic Imaginations," in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Sterne, Routledge University Press, 2012.
Kris Racaniello is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Racaniello’s Dissertation project is entitled “The Power of Material Narratives: Constructing Shrines Across the Pyrenees Over the Long Twelfth Century.” Kris is involved in the project “Conques in the Global World,” acting as head of the project’s auralization, collecting acoustic data and processing the soundscape of the Abbey Church in Conques. At the Bibliotheca Hertziana, they are the 2023–2025 Kress Institutional Fellow.
Textile architecture has shaped the history of sound, yet the relationship between acoustics and textile histories remains underexplored in archaeoacoustics due to the overwhelming archival absence of these fluid, built environments. Acoustic snapshots of historical architectural spaces can be collected by recording reverberation times (RT), but these lack a crucial component: vanished installation materials. Combining published RT data, this talk rethinks models of historical soundscapes with textile architectures. I discuss extant textiles and present a theoretical model for how these may have created new sound textures at Conques, shaping bodily devotional responses in the space.