Sonic Pasts. Acoustical Heritage and Historical Soundscapes - Mariana J López. Abingdon: Routledge, 2025
by Marcel Cobussen
While reading Sonic Pasts: Acoustical Heritage and Historical Soundscapes, I was frequently reminded of my current and former PhD students in Early Music. Whereas the first and second generations of Historically Informed Performance Practice (HIPP) musicians—such as Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Ton Koopman, and William Christie—largely adopted a positivist approach, believing that objective truths about past musical practices could be uncovered through empirical research (examining manuscripts, treatises, instruments, and other historical evidence) and subsequently translated into performance, contemporary historically informed performers and scholars tend to adopt a post-positivist or critical-historicist stance. They recognize “authenticity” as a constructed concept, emphasize the plurality of historical practices, and highlight the situated nature of interpretation. They also argue that the past is not a static entity awaiting discovery, but rather a malleable construct that responds—if at all—to present-day questions and concerns.
In her book, López effectively dismantles the illusion of historical “truth” when it comes to reconstructing sounds from the past, arguing that such pursuits often reinforce reductive and misleading stereotypes. Reflecting on her work on the York Mystery Plays—a cycle of religious plays performed on movable wagons in York from the 14th to the 16th centuries—she writes:
My work sought to present acoustical and soundscapes research on medieval drama in York to non-specialist audiences, while simultaneously engaging these audiences with concepts concerning multiple interpretations of the past, the curation of history, and how acoustic and soundscape recreations (even when based on carefully researched material) represent only one possibility of what the past ‘might’ have sounded like. (López 2025: 161)
In essence, López argues for a multiplicity of ways of listening to history. Given the overwhelming number of unknowns, she maintains that it is ethically problematic to present only a single version of how the past may have sounded. Instead, a wide range of possibilities deserves exploration, not least because performances such as the York Mystery Plays took place outdoors, where contingent sounds would inevitably have shaped the acoustic environment. López therefore concludes that the (sonic) past cannot be fixed.
Although this reflection on historical research and “truth” serves as the point of departure for my review, López also addresses several other issues that impede research on historical soundscapes. Already on the second page she identifies her central questions concerning the preservation of acoustical heritage and historical soundscapes: What is chosen to be preserved, and who determines this? She exposes several biases, particularly geographic ones, such as the privileging of (white, male, middle-class, non-disabled) Western histories and listeners. She also draws attention to the emphasis on sounds associated with socially, culturally, or politically prominent buildings and spaces, and to the neglect of “negative” sound heritages, including soundscapes of trauma and acoustics of torture.
Critical observations dominate Chapters 3 and 4, which address UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage and the World Heritage Convention and World Heritage List, respectively. Among the issues López raises in roughly 100 pages—about half the book—are the following:
- The vast majority of entries on the World Heritage List do not consider sound as a significant characteristic of the sites they aim to protect. And when sound is mentioned, it is often in the context of noise monitoring, with silence, quietness, and tranquility being assigned greater value than other sonic experiences (pp. 93–97). López poses the rhetorical question of whether transforming historical sites into quiet spaces—Stonehenge being a principal example—is historically accurate or rather reflects the preferences of predominantly (white) middle- and upper-class visitors (p. 103). She notes that quiet has become the privileged norm, but too little attention is paid to who is silencing and who is being silenced (p. 129).
- Despite this, attention is given to bells, whistled languages, festivities, processions (e.g., Holy Week), ceremonies, and non-musical sound-producing objects such as oxcarts. However, López calls for greater acknowledgement of sounds considered unpleasant by a community, as these too may form part of its cultural heritage (p. 63).
- She observes a preference for folklore and oral traditions, along with a tendency to treat traditional cultures in essentialist, tangible, and archival terms. López instead argues for abandoning notions such as authenticity in favor of respecting traditional knowledge (pp. 55–59). Generally, she finds little attention given to what the sonic characteristics of a site mean to local communities in preservation processes (p. 115). She thus calls for greater respect for cultural and heritage diversity in conservation practices (p. 57).
- She identifies the underrepresentation of women in sonic archives. Women’s sonic experiences and uses of sound—shaped by their divergent social roles—require more recognition (p. 74).
- López challenges the binary between intangible and tangible heritage, which she argues is untenable when applied to sound. For instance, in Turkish tea culture, soundwalking, or the acoustics of a venue, sound encompasses both tangible and intangible elements (p. 63).
- She critiques the conservational privileging of monumental heritage and their soundscapes at the expense of outdoor settings (streets), everyday life, and temporary structures (pp. 74–77). Large corporations typically support only the restoration of prestigious sites and soundscapes—such as the restoration of Notre Dame in Paris funded by TotalEnergies (p. 125). This focus often implies that sonic heritage outside Europe receives neither adequate financial support nor appropriate recognition. When it does, Western conceptual frameworks are frequently imposed (p. 76).
- Disability is another neglected dimension of acoustical heritage and soundscape work. Few scholars have considered how acoustical environments might have affected blind or visually impaired people, or deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals. López attributes this oversight to ableist barriers in society (pp. 81–82).
Despite López’s justified critiques, these two chapters also reveal a surprising richness and diversity in the ways historical soundscapes are preserved. Both UNESCO and the World Heritage List include references to bells, theatre acoustics, the relationship between sound and spirituality, sound in medical and security systems, natural soundscapes, and more.
For me, the most compelling chapter is the fifth, where López shifts from surveying existing practices to presenting “a novel framework in which sound heritage work is reflected in terms of evocation, recreation, dramatisation, artistic reflection, remote access, and trauma” (p. 150):
- Evocation: Sounds are created primarily to evoke the past. These sounds are not necessarily “authentic,” but they offer a contextual impression of how certain sites might have sounded (pp. 158–161).
- Recreation: Sounds are selected or composed based on thorough site-specific research, increasing the likelihood that they once occurred there. However, given the uncertainty and contingency of sound, López opts to present multiple acoustical possibilities in her own research projects (pp. 161–167).
- Dramatisation: This category relies primarily on the voice to convey information and engage audiences, for example through imagined conversations. Video games, for instance, enable explorations of acoustical heritage that might otherwise remain inaccessible (pp. 167–169).
- Artistic reflection: Here, artists offer historically informed interpretations of past soundscapes and sites, often using historical materials and/or instruments (pp. 169–171).
- Remote access: Through computer modelling—using impulse response measurements, auralization techniques, and the processing of sounds as if they are recorded at specific historical places, etc.—listeners can access the acoustics of heritage sites from a distance.
- Trauma: The final category, and clearly one of López’s central concerns, addresses sounds perceived as negative or harmful. This includes Muzak, sonic weapons such as the Mosquito and LRAD, and the deployment of sound and silence as tools of torture (pp. 171–182).
Sonic Pasts is an engaging book for anyone interested in historical soundscapes—combinations of sounds that scholars and artists, based on research, believe were experienced within particular cultural contexts at specific times and places (p. 5). At times it feels somewhat overly meticulous, such as when López summarizes material she has just covered or will cover in the following section. A bibliography at the end of each chapter in addition to one at the end of the book also seems redundant. Moreover, devoting nearly half the book to critiquing UNESCO and the World Heritage Convention could have been balanced with a stronger emphasis on successful and exemplary cases of acoustical heritage preservation. After all, who would not be intrigued to learn, for example, how the sounds of medieval pigs were shaped by the acoustics of the streets and where those animals might have stood when producing such sounds (p. 33)?
