EVENTS AND LATEST NEWS

June has been a month full of events. Just after Inter.noise 2019, in the afternoon of Monday 24th June 2019, I attended the Centre for Digital Heritage Conference at the University of York. The conference put together the great variety of research projects around digital heritage, showing how the use of leading-edge technology and virtual reality tools help us to move heritage research further. We participated with a talk on Cathedral Acoustics and their sound as an important part of their Intangible Heritage.

In order to see the complete program of the conference do click here.

On 16th -19th June I was attending Inter.noise 2019 in Madrid, Spain. Three intense days full of fantastic talks, demos, meetings and networking. Participants from more than 60 countries met in the capital city of Spain to share information about the latest scientific developments in acoustics.

The acoustic study of heritage building was a hot topic during the conference, with presentations on the "Acoustic characterization of Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela", on the "Characteristic function of impulse responses in churches" and on the use of "Auralization as a tool of historic reconstruction of Vadstena abbey church". Our contribution, with a conference paper entitled "Cathedral Acoustics: Bristol Cathedral as a case study" received very good feed-back and lot of interest was shown during the poster session on the morning on the 17th June. I also presented a paper on the "Reverberation perception in Spanish cathedrals" fruit of a previous work carried out at the University of Seville.

As an extra, I had the pleasure to share these days with our colleague and collaborator, Angel Alvarez-Corbacho.

In order to see the website of the project click here and to see the complete proceeding of the conference do click here.

On 1st June 2019, Mariana Lopez and myself, Lidia Alvarez, spent the day in the city centre of York bringing the acoustics of heritage sites closer to the 2425 people that came along to the event. We developed an activity to show the participants how a space modifies a sound and how that information can be recovered and used. Just wearing a pair of headphones, they could hear what they were saying in front of a microphone in 4 different spaces: a cave in Scotland, a national park in Finland, a cathedral here in Yorkshire, and a Roman theatre in Spain. They were virtually transported to that spaces, by listening to their own voices as if they were physically in the chosen space, and that is why we named our activity "Where Would you Like to Sing?". The feedback received was very positive and most of the participant wanted to know more about the science behind this and the Cathedral Acoustic project. Children reaction was amazing in some cases, specially when they listened to their voices in the interior of the cave and also when they were dared to sing in the nave of Ripon cathedral.

We would like to thanks the organisation for make things so easy for us and to Claudia Nader for their kind help during the event.

If you want to know more do visit the website of the event by clicking here.

The acoustic measurement sessions of the York Minster were carried out during the evenings of May 26th and 29th, when the cathedral was unoccupied. Seven positions of the sound source were necessary to characterise the peculiar acoustic behaviour of this magnificent Gothic cathedral, all of them chosen considering the present and past use of the space, and also taking into account its architectural features. A total of 76 receiver positions were distributed throughout the different audience/congregation areas, in which the room impulse responses were registered by using two types of microphones (B-format and dummy head). The monaural and binaural RIR registered are being currently anlysed.

The research team of the project, CATHEDRAL ACOUSTICS, and the University of York acknowledge the Dean and the staff of the cathedral for their kind collaboration and assistance during the measurements. We also would like to thanks all the volunteers helping during the measurements, their collaboration was crucial to be able to perform the measurements.

On 25 and 26 January 2019 I had the opportunity of attending the workshop on "Early Modern Global Soundscapes" held by the University of York, where international researchers from a variety of disciplines (Music, English, History, Architecture and Engineering) met to discuss about the current research on historic "sounds and soundscapes".

After a two-day program of assorted presentations and enriching discussions, I had the opportunity of participate in the final round-table together with Mariana Lopez (Theatre, Film and Television), Helen Hills (History of Art), Mark Jenner (History), and Emilie Murphy (History). I tried to add my grain of sand to the debate by sharing my perspective as an acoustician, based on my experience on the research of the acoustics of European cathedrals. The general conclusion of this interactive dialogue was that more interdisciplinary studies and collaborations are needed to properly research and plausible recreate soundscapes, specially those related with our past and our culture.

If you want to know more about the workshop, I recommend this excellent summary by Hannah Rodger (University of York), just click here.