George Demidowicz, former conservation officer at Coventry County Council, led the team around some of Coventry's historic sites of interest, including Holy Trinity Church, the ruins of St Michael's, and St Mary's Guildhall, our three study locations, and St John's Bablake, a 15th-century guild chapel and now a parish church. George led many conservation and archeology projects during his time with the council and was instrumental in bringing the BBC's Time Team to Coventry twice in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He oversaw the development of the Priory Undercroft into a visitor experience (now sadly mothballed due to cuts) and spearheaded the restoration of the medieval kitchens at St Mary's Guildhall. George has written several books on Coventry buildings, including on the history of St Michael's church, and is a wealth of knowledge and expertise on the medieval city. We are delighted to have George on our advisory board for this project.
We have measured the convolution reverb in three of Coventry's surviving historic buildings to provide comparative data for our virtual acoustic of St Michael's, and for our dynamic VR research spaces. The clip below shows Izzy working with a sine sweep to capture reverberation from different locations in the church.
Background work on the evidence base for our research is ongoing. We have begun plotting some of the significant events, documents, and artefacts we are working with on our Research Timeline (coming soon).
We have taken LiDAR scans of St Mary's Guildhall and Holy Trinity Church as the first step in the VR modeling process. As well as providing accurate measurements, floor plans, and visual references for building our virtual research spaces, the 'digital twins' of these two buildings allow us to 'visit' whenever we like to look at architectural features and think about how changes to each space might affect our perception of music or our performances. You can view these models and look around the spaces yourself: St Mary's Guildhall can be seen here; Holy Trinity Church can be seen here.
Helen and Jamie presented an introduction to the Aural Histories project at the Schola Cantorum, Basel Cornetto Study Day, sharing plans for the project and progress so far with students, performers and academics working in the field of historical performance practice.
Simon has begun experimenting with anechoic vs dry studio recording in preparation for creating material to play through our virtual acoustics. Here, Jamie is playing cornett fanfares in the anechoic studio at the University of Birmingham, and members of RBC's student vocal ensemble are recording Byrd motets in the RBC studios.
One of the artifacts on which the Experience of Worship project's St Teilo reconstruction Tudor organ was based comes from Holy Trinity Church, Coventry. An indenture from 1526 provides details of specifications and costs for a new instrument commissioned by the church, and builders Martin Goetze and Dominic Gwynn used this source in their research. We have sampled the St Teilo organ and will now be able to play it directly into the dynamic virtual acoustic of the church once modeling is complete.
Aural Histories features in Historic Brass Today, the newsletter of the Historic Brass Society (Click the image to read the article)
We were waiting for some dry weather to scan the ruins of St Michael's and June did not disappoint. With the LiDAR measurements of all our buildings now complete, we can start to extrapolate line drawings, apply material changes to the spaces, and develop virtual acoustics. A digital reconstruction of St Michael's should be complete early next year. You can view the 'digital twin' of the ruins of St Michael's here.
Members of His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts (Helen Roberts, Jamie Savan and Stephanie Dyer) were joined by specialist wind players Nicholas Perry and William Lyons to complete experimental recordings in Holy Trinity Church, the dry studio at RBC, and the anechoic studio at the University of Birmingham to provide comparative data that will inform our virtual acoustics.
In July this year, we hosted a full team study day at RBC. This brought together the research team and members of the advisory board for the first time to share findings from the first nine months of the project and to discuss future plans and activities. The pictures show: Jamie Savan giving an overview of progress to date; Mattia Colombo, an RA working on acoustic modelling, and Simon Hall demonstrating some initial comparisons between live and simulated acoustics; James Cook demonstrating VR applications for heritage locations arising from the AHRC-funded Linlithgow Chapel project.
Members of the team have presented papers in Munich and Prague and a poster in Oxford (pictured above) this summer, introducing the project to the wider research community and sharing some initial findings. Details of these papers can be found here.
Jamie, Helen, and other members of His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts, one of our associated ensembles, joined the choir of Holy Trinity Church, Coventry for a special choral evensong on 8th October this year. This was our first opportunity to engage the community at Holy Trinity, and in Coventry more broadly, with our research into the place where they live. We held a short talk after the service to explain more about what we are doing. The service was attended by the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress of Coventry, Cllr Jaswant Singh Birdi and his wife Krishna, and the Deputy Lord Lieutenant of the West Midlands, Pauline Black. The music for the service was chosen to celebrate the 400th anniversaries of the deaths of Thomas Weelkes and William Byrd, two composers whose music may have been heard in Coventry during the Aural Histories study period, and we used performance practices and historical instruments that would have been familiar to Coventry's early modern citizens. You can see some images from the event in the slideshow to the right, with all photos credited to Mandip Singh Seehra.
