Aural Histories features in Historic Brass Today, the newsletter of the Historic Brass Society (Click the image to read the article)
Gathering evidence from surviving church interiors: Fairford (Gloucs), Wootton Wawen (Warks), Croscombe (Somerset), Newark (Lincs), and Manchester Cathedral, October 2023
For example, we used a 3-part faburden setting of the Te Deum, in alternatim with chant verses, found in the Gyffard partbooks, and a setting of Laudate pueri devised by Magnus Williamson using faburden of the fourth kind. Ian Harrison, a leading exponent of medieval performance practices on winds who joined us on shawm for our performances, devised a basse dance on the tenor of the Agnus Dei from the Caput Mass to bring a Coventry flavour to the alta capella repertoire for three instruments.
This public engagement event, developed in collaboration with project partners Holy Trinity Church and with the education team at St Mary's Guildhall, presented a whole day of music centred around the medieval and early Tudor parts of our research project. The event was held on Midsummer's Eve, a major opportunity for feasting and celebration, both secular and sacred, during the medieval and early Tudor periods, and for which Coventry's archival records provide substantial supporting documentation. Afternoon 'meet the instruments' sessions attracted members of the public to free performances and demonstrations of the type of music that may have been heard around the streets of Coventry before the Reformation. A Choral Evensong, celebrating the feast of St John the Baptist, which falls on Midsummer's Day, was embellished by music from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that explored the changing soundworld of Holy Trinity Church during the formative years of the Church of England. After the service, professor Christian Frost gave a short public talk about the relationship between music and architecture within Holy Trinity, and explained some of the research processes we are using to document the historical space. The day closed with a free concert performance by the Binchois Consort and His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts of sacred and secular music with Coventry connections that will feature in our auralisations of historical spaces towards the end of the project. The event allowed us to gather responses from the public about their impressions of our research project so far and the impact it is having on their understanding of the history and culture of the place in which they live. The concert and evensong programmes can be seen below, along with some photographic impressions of the event.
We were joined by The Binchois Consort (dir. Andrew Kirkman) and members of His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts, plus special guests William Lyons, Ian Harrison, and David Yacus to record our 1451 and 1528 repertoire. The performance practices we are modelling are informed by records relating to singing provision and to the activities of Coventry's waits during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that challenge the prevailing a capella approach to liturgical repertoire from this period.
We have enhanced our existing SketchUp models to improve the visual representation of our study locations using Blender, an open source modelling package. Blender enables more detailed modelling work on, for example, soft furnishings, and better workflow around materials and textures, which will be important once the models are integrated into a game engine environment later in the project. The images to the right show some of the references that feature in the visual representation of our spaces, including the three organs we have modelled.
In January 2025 we finished recording all of the audio materials that we will use for experimentation in virtual acoustics. This included recording some congregational singing for the 1560 case study to reflect the possible early adoption of this new practice evidenced by the Holy Trinity Churchwardens' Accounts for the early years of Elizabeth I's reign. We invited volunteers from the present-day choir of Holy Trinity Church, together with their Director of Music Alexander Norman, to come to the studios at RBC and record Psalm 95 and Psalm 100 in two different styles. The first took a metrical setting of the text of Psalm 95, published by John Day in 1560, sung to a popular ballad tune. This manner of performance is one way in which scholars have suggested congregational singing gained a foothold in England after the Reformation. We also recorded a harmonisation of Psalm 100 by John Dowland, published by Ravenscoft in 1621, for the 1640 case study to demonstrate how composers interacted with this tradition into the seventeenth century.
Using the geometry and material properties of our 3D models, we have rendered high-quality audio outputs of our recorded materials using Odeon, the industry standard acoustics modelling software. This has given us a benchmark for our PhD student, Reiss Smith, as he works on emulating spatialised audio in game environments. The changing material characteristics of the buildings over time can be heard in the renders we have produced. We have used a series of fixed listener positions in our renders, which will be replicated in our smartphone app, allowing listeners to experience different perspectives on historical repertoire appropriate to the time period.
We have been working to embed the audio and visual materials created by the Aural Histories project into a smartphone app using Unreal Engine. The app will be launched in beta in September this year. The images below give an impression of the spaces that users will be able to explore using the app.
Members of the Aural Histories team attended the launch of the CreaTech Frontiers programme, jointly hosted at BCU, in May 2025, to showcase the development of the Aural Histories app to the West Midlands creative technology sector. We presented the short video below explaining some of the processes involved in bringing historical documentation and architectural evidence together in our 3D models.
