‘Close your eyes, it’s the 17th century’. This is the tantalizing invitation made by Lidia Alvares-Morales and Mariana Lopez’s project ‘Cathedral Acoustics in Early Modern England: Exploring and Recreating the Sounds of the Past’ (https://emsoundscapes.co.uk/cathedral-acoustics-in-early-modern-england-exploring-and-recreating-the-sounds-of-the-past/, 27 September 2025). Their premise underpins some of the recently proliferating research on historical sound reconstruction more widely; for ‘seventeenth century’, read any period from before the advent of recording technology. Reconstructing soundscapes from before the advent of sound recording purportedly allows us not only to gain knowledge about the auditory perceptions of historical subjects, but, if we try hard enough (by shutting our eyes), to recreate those perceptions for ourselves. The ‘Virtual Paul’s Cross Project’ thus offers, via digital reconstruction, ‘the experience of hearing John Donne’s sermon for Gunpowder Day, November 5th, 1622 in Paul’s Churchyard’ (https://vpcross.chass.ncsu.edu, 27 September 2025).

My eighteenth-century-leaning readers might instead wish to sample the Piazza di Spagna in Rome in 1704, by means of a ninety-second audio clip that reconstructs the listening experience of an eighteenth-century spectator of the serenade Le gare festive (https://on.soundcloud.com/gMm3l8TTXRT9TqKGsR, 27 September 2025). A sonic journey to Naples in 1790 combines historical research, natural language processing, architectural acoustics and virtual acoustic modelling to ‘achieve historically accurate and physically based soundscape reconstructions’ (Hasan Baran Firat, Massimiliano Masullo and Luigi Maffei, ‘Interactive Soundscape Mapping for 18th-Century Naples: A Historically Informed Approach’, Acoustics 7/2 (2025), 1). Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden’s much more circumspect approach in her ‘Organs of the Soul’ project recreates the historical acoustemology of listeners in eighteenth-century Paris via a ‘web of sonic knowledge’ (https://soundboxproject.com/project-organs.html, 27 September 2025). She contends elsewhere that ‘digital audible history should not only recover and reconstruct sounds, but, more importantly, it should also reanimate historical acoustemologies’ (‘Digital Approaches to Historical Acoustemologies: Replication and Reenactment’, in Digital Sound Studies, ed. Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller and Whitney Trettien (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 244). A news release about another Paris-based project that recreates the 1730s soundscape of the Chatêlet declares that ‘all the sounds were recorded with an ear for historic accuracy. Noises from machines (like looms or printing presses) were made with antique devices, and the sounds of livestock are from real animals’ (https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/87019/immerse-yourself-sounds-18th-century-paris, 27 September 2025).

But wait – do twenty-first-century cows sound like eighteenth-century cows? Do sound historians perhaps need the authenticity debate that musicology went through back in the 1980s? Hardly so: those in charge of these projects, many of whom are musicologists themselves, are usually well informed about the pitfalls. Simone Caputo, who headed the Piazza di Spagna project, cautions that ‘the historian can only hint at a soundscape of the past’ (‘Noise and Music Together: Soundscapes of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Rome’, in Music, Place and Identity in Italian Urban Soundscapes circa 1550–1860, ed. Franco Piperno, Simone Caputo and Emmanuele Senici (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023), 108). In his monograph on early-modern Parisian soundscapes, the historian of French literature Nicholas Hammond acknowledges that ‘a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century ear would have been attuned to and accustomed to very different sounds from those perceived by the modern ear; noises in the background that might have been so familiar to an early modern listener as to be unworthy of mention would very probably sound extraordinary to a modern listener, and vice versa’ (The Powers of Sound and Song in Early Modern Paris (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), 22). And Richard Cullen Rath, one of the pioneers of early-modern sonic historiography, had already noted that the ‘construction of the soundscape is not meant to be ironclad’; it is only ‘a starting point for efforts to unearth historically constructed assumptions about how we hear. It gives us a frame for comparisons with other times and places and thus helps us denaturalize and historicize our sense of hearing’ (‘Hearing American History’, The Journal of American History 95/2 (2008), 428).

More recently, scholars from Niall Atkinson (The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016)) to Daniele Filippi and Michael J. Noone (Listening to Early Modern Catholicism: Perspectives from Musicology (Leiden: Brill, 2017)) have built on this premise to offer expertly reimagined historical soundscapes that successfully defamiliarize, if not exoticize, their historical locations and subjects. Sounds that were common at one point but have become rare or extinct nowadays, such as those from bells, balladeers and street criers, often serve as particularly potent markers of the otherness of these historical locales. But if the insight that the past is a foreign country is a cliché, it is also sometimes not taken far enough, at least in those reconstructions consisting mainly of a – often highly sophisticated – blend of audio signals. To put it pointedly, we need to move beyond a quaint fascination with clopping hooves, especially if that quaintness shades into the patronizing, as it inadvertently might. For soundscapes are not constituted solely by acoustic phenomena and the spaces in which they occurred, but crucially also by the people that populated those spaces and received the acoustic signals. These dimensions cannot be separated; but all too often, as Martin Daughtry has admonished, ‘the “ear” that constitutes the soundscape remains an abstraction, a mute and essentially passive recipient of waves, the enabling fiction of an idealized sonic environment’. Daughtry continues: ‘If the soundscape concept is to be brought into alignment with the most incisive new work on sound and listening, we will need to reattach its abstract ear to a historically and culturally inflected body’ (Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma and Survival in Wartime Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 122).

Historically informed listening, then, does not just involve developing a period ear, as Shai Burstyn explored some time ago (‘In Quest of the Period Ear’, Early Music 25/4 (1997), 692–702). Since these historical ears formed part of whole human beings, anything approaching a faithful reconstruction would need to see us acquire nothing less than a complete period body-soul. In my own recent work, building on the pioneering scholarship of Gail Kern Paster (The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)) and Elisabeth Le Guin (Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)), I have tried to reimagine this early-modern occidental anthropology in all its diversity and contradictions (Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023)). What I found is that these historical bodies – including their ears – were more radically different from our post-Cartesian selves than we tend to assume: permeated by humoral-spiritual-affective flows, interpenetrating with each other and their environment, open, leaky, agential, unruly, plenisentient. Try and imagine experiencing the racket of a densely packed early-modern market square with that kind of body.

And there is more. When Atkinson asserts that historical sounds are always ‘burdened with meaning’ (‘The Republic of Sound: Listening to Florence at the Threshold of the Renaissance’, I Tatti Studies 16/1 (2013), 59), I would add that this meaningfulness goes all the way down, which for the early-modern period means a fundamental difference in the worldview that underpinned their sonic experiences. In Western modernity (broadly defined), the basic reality of the world has tended to be figured as chaos, randomness, noise. If things make sense, or are beautiful, this happens in a haphazard, ambiguous and unstable way. Early-modern occidental Christians instead lived in a universe that was fundamentally harmonious. This grounding harmonious hum of the world was not audible to mortal humans driven out of paradise; the fact that life on earth was loud and discordant, and that the Pythagorean comma left music perennially out of tune, was the outcome of the Fall and the resultant untuning of the world. But faint resonances of the all-encompassing harmony of God’s creation were still audible in mortal music-making, which in its best moments offered a foretaste of the gloriously consonant soundscape of heaven. Thomas Browne, who was seventeen years old when Donne preached his Gunpowder Day sermon in 1622, wrote twenty years later:

Of course, by the eighteenth century, this worldview was very much in the process of breaking down, so it would take some detailed archival digging to determine what beliefs those passers-by in Piazza di Spagna may have held about the universe’s musical or non-musical properties. But at least for some contemporaries, the idea of universal harmony continued to hold. Of the many possible examples I could cite, here is just one from the Catholic preacher Ignaz Ertl: ‘The fact that the heavenly music of the planetary spheres above is not heard by us earthly inhabitants is due, according to Pythagoras, to the constant noise, great racket and hubbub of the unquiet world below, where things are confused and broken up’ (‘Daß aber diese obere Himmels-Music der Planetischen Sphaeren von uns irdischen Inwohnern nicht angehört werde / das verursachet / nach Aussag Pythagorae, das einige Getöß / grosses Gereusch und Getümmel der ierunteren unruhigen Welt / worinnen es so verwirret und zerütt zugehet’; Sonn- und Feyer- Tägliches Tolle Lege (Nuremberg: Bleul, 1708), 753). These modern and pre-modern visions of the cosmos converge, then, in the sense that the world inhabited by humans is noise and chaos; but they do so from diametrically opposed perspectives, and with radically different possibilities for redemption.

Not surprisingly, the modern-day discipline of sound studies has tended to reproduce the sonic epistemology of modernity in its attitudes to music. Music is usually treated as simply one particular species of sound, which in turn puts musicology at risk of being swallowed up by sound studies. Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson’s inventory of sounds that make up past aural worlds lists musical sounds (‘the sociable musical gatherings of amateur musicians’) indiscriminately alongside ‘the cacophony of street noises’, ‘the hum of the market’, ‘the hushed murmurs of the court’ and so on (‘Introduction’, in Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300–1918, ed. Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson (London: Routledge, 2017), 1). Ari Y. Kelman has articulated the underlying assumption more explicitly: ‘Music is always but one sonic phenomenon among many, and, no matter how much music one hears, it cannot approach the complex meanings attached to sound as it is made by non-artists’ (‘Rethinking the Soundscape: A Critical Genealogy of a Key Term in Sound Studies’, The Senses and Society 5/2 (2010), 221). Perhaps it is necessary for a newish discipline such as sound studies to mark out its territory somewhat aggressively in this way; hence the sound-studies scholar James Mansell recently voiced the concern that ‘as music scholars are increasingly leading the debate about engagement with past sound, the risk is that “sound” will become, again, the exclusive terrain of music disciplines and the occasional sound-minded media scholar’ (‘Historical Acoustemology: Past, Present, and Future’, Music Research Annual 2 (2012), 12). And no wonder that Tim Carter, writing from the other side of the divide, concludes anxiously: ‘Where does music sit within the broader category of ‘Sound Studies’? . . . Very uncomfortably, it seems’ (‘Some Thoughts on (Early Modern) Sound, Space, and Time’, in Music, Place and Identity in Italian Urban Soundscapes circa 1550–1860, ed. Piperno, Caputo and Senici, 24). Most recently, the primacy of unordered, chaotic sound in Western modernity is reaffirmed in Christoph Cox’s notion of the ‘sonic flux’, understood as the universe’s perpetual inaudible flow of primal sonic matter that precedes history, human culture and music (Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018)). Strikingly, Cox’s idea of this ‘sonic real’ as inaccessible and incalculable, with only momentary access granted to sound-art practitioners, places it very close to the early-modern conception of earthly music as a fleeting foretaste of the joys of heaven; both views presuppose a basic reality that remains out of reach for the limited human sensory apparatus.

I am not here to adjudicate between these different worldviews, or to define the status of music vis-à-vis sound. But I do think that any serious attempt to reconstruct the historical acoustemologies of early-modern occidental Christianity would need to start from this fundamental difference in how people experienced sound, harmony and discord in the world. How would the faintly audible strains of that 1704 Roman serenade have resonated within a body-soul that was itself suffused with an inaudible harmony that connected it palpably to the body-souls of those around them? Clearly these experiences would have been multiple and differentiated among different genders, social estates, confessional affiliations, individual dispositions and the like. But overall, this fundamental difference suggests that these past ways of hearing were probably more foreign than our well-meaning reconstructions of their acoustic environments seem to assume. We would do well, I think, as (music) historians, to heed Dylan Robinson’s critique of conventional soundscape theory and its imposition of a Western framework onto other contexts, and adopt a more ‘critical listening positionality’ towards occidental historical subjects too (Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 2). As the historian Anton Froeyman has recently argued, any history writing necessarily raises ethical concerns regarding the nature of our relationship to the past people we study: ‘the central virtue of writing history’, he writes, ‘is the recognition of the other in its otherness and uniqueness’ (History, Ethics and the Recognition of the Other: A Levinasian View on the Writing of History (New York: Routledge, 2016), 193). Interestingly, Froeyman uses nothing less than the Historically Informed Performance movement to illustrate his claim that historical sources underdetermine their objects, and that any engagement with history needs to start from this basic acknowledgement of otherness. Perhaps, in our current collective longing for experiential contact with the past, we may wish to foster an increased sensitivity towards the distance that separates us from our objects of desire, while continuing to devise imaginative ways of making possible those transformative moments of encounter between past and present.