Sound studies have been growing exponentially in recent years, creating exciting new collaborations between artists and sound engineers, between historians of science and musicologists. While there has been a lot of interest regarding the history of the different technologies that transmit, record, and preserve sound, from telephones to phonographs, recording and reproduction devices, these archives have tended to document mostly a modern idea of sound, especially from the 19th century onward. Earlier periods have to contend with the absence of a contemporary record of these sounds except for the textual references to them, whether in historical, musical, scientific, or literary materials. Among these texts, only voice and musical materials can be recreated/performed, while the complex aural dimension of everyday life that is critical to the experience of the medieval period, literature in particular, is something that students, scholars, and the general public, are left to “imagine” without having recourse to an archive.

This site is part of my ongoing research project. This digital humanities project is a first step in gathering a number of soundscapes circumscribed at this stage by the period and the space defined by Medieval Iberia, a location and a period in which the exchanges between multiple languages, religions, and ethnicities produced a rich set of cultures with productive contrasts at all levels --including sound.

As the only contemporary record of sound available to us from eras in which there was no other recording technology available, written language that alludes, suggests, or directly references different soundscapes, is the only approximation that we have to this primary sense of cognition. Literature’s relation to the aural is not only as record, however. While medieval literature was mostly experienced through the ear, this aural dimension is not only crucial at the level of dissemination, but is essential to composition itself. While sound’s import is most evident in poetry, it is also as part of literature’s most complex rhetorical edifices, from onomatopoeia to allegory, from scene-building to characterization. Using medieval Iberian literary texts as pretexts or starting points for these different roles of sound in literature, this collection puts together fragments of works that demand a sonic literacy from the audience to understand, supplement, or interpret texts. The sound files gathered in these archives are themselves approximations, reimagining medieval sound, attempting to bridge the gap between our present loss and a fictional archive.