Earlier this year, I visited the farmland where my Irish ancestors lived and worked from the mid-1850s to the early 1920s. Just a few years ago, I didn’t even know their names. And yet here I was, a century after the last Mattimoe (pronounced “Mattimer”) died, walking among a herd of cows on what was once the family’s dairy farm in County Leitrim. 

“Mattimoe Fields,” County Leitrim, Ireland. May 2024. (Copyright Lori Mortimer, 2024)

As an audio person, I wondered what the farm sounded like 100–150 years ago. No airplanes, cars, or farm tractors, of course. But what about the wind, grasses, wildlife, farm animals, music, or the sound of people working hard and hopefully laughing sometimes?

Can we even know what a place sounded like in the past?

Thanks to ethnomusicologists, acoustical archaeologists, and acoustical historians, we can get reasonably close. I learned about their work from three stellar podcast episodes I listened to this year.

Phantom Power: “The Sound World of Harriet Tubman”

In “The Sound World of Harriet Tubman,” by Phantom Power podcast, ethnomusicologist Maya Cunningham reads her Ms. Magazine essay about the musical world Tubman lived in. Cunningham calls her written essay a sound collage, a description that becomes fully realized in audio.

Phantom Power producer Ravi Krishnaswami weaves Cunningham’s narration with sounds she provided him: her field recordings from Brodess Farm, where Tubman was born and raised, and recordings of African instruments and African American spirituals that research shows Tubman would have known. (Cunningham created a Spotify playlist to accompany the essay.)

Cunningham draws a direct line from Tubman’s musical environment, rooted in Christian faith, to her self-liberation and abolitionist activism. From the field workers’ songs to hymns and spirituals sung during secret Hush Arbor meetings, Tubman’s world resounded with voices singing about freedom, whether here on Earth or in the afterlife.

My favorite revelation: Tubman used her voice and this music to secure freedom. She sang “Bound by the Promised Land” to alert her family that she was about to make her escape. And she sang other spirituals and hymns as coded instructions to the Underground Railroad travelers she conducted.

This episode was one of my favorite listens of the year. Come for the gorgeous sound essay and stay for the interview with Cunningham at the end.

Materially Speaking: “Notre-Dame: An Acoustic Reconstruction”

With last week’s reopening of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, most news stories have covered the architectural and aesthetic reconstruction.

Equally fascinating to me was the acoustic reconstruction. Would architects and artisans make the building look and sound as it once did? The cathedral was well known for its acoustics, particularly its reverberance. Acoustic archaeologists and historians didn’t want that environment, which had been altered by the 2019 fire, to be lost forever.

Materially Speaking episode “Notre-Dame: An Acoustic Reconstruction” describes how, in 2015, a Sorbonne research group created a virtual-reality model of the cathedral’s soundscape. The acoustic measurements they took became indispensable during the post-fire reconstruction.  

They used those measurements and knowledge of the restoration materials to predict the cathedral’s post-restoration acoustics. They also researched Notre Dame’s acoustic history, incorporating what they learned into their virtual-reality model. Using that VR model, while the real building was closed for restoration, singers performed in a virtual Notre Dame across different historical periods.

This episode covers much more, including a 16th-century instrument called the serpent, the placement and direction of choir-organ pipes, the effort to record the sounds of the artisans at their craft, and even the acoustic impact of cathedral tourists.

Field & Foley: “Episode 11 – Mariana Lopez”

Although this episode is the most technical of the three, it explains a practical application for podcast sound design.

Have you ever wanted to create a certain sound for a scene but lacked the skills to do it? Maybe you wanted a voice to sound like it was in a cave or on the phone. Or maybe you needed a scene where you could hear, through your childhood bedroom wall, the muffled guitars of your brother’s KISS album rocking and rolling all night.

You can create these effects by noodling with things like EQ, delay, and reverb. But if, like me, you’re not an audio engineer, that can be a lengthy trial-and-error slog.

Luckily, with free DAW convolution reverb plugins like Soundly’s Place It and Melba Productions’ MConvolutionEZ, you can simply choose the acoustic effect you want from a preset list and apply it to your clip.  

Place It main interface (L) and preset menu (R)

I never understood how convolution worked until I listened to Field & Foley podcast Episode 11 – Mariana Lopez. Lopez is a researcher who recreates historical-site soundscapes with computer modeling and acoustic measurements – pretty much the same work done in Notre Dame.

(Now, this is where things get more technical. If you like nerdy details, stay with me! If that’s not your thing, no worries. I’ll be back with another issue soon. In the meantime, treat yourself to a download of Place It or MConvolutionEZ and have fun!)

The acoustic measurements come from impulse responses recorded in a given indoor or outdoor space. To capture an impulse response, you record a sound (the impulse) – like a balloon pop – and the resulting sound reverberations (the response). That recording (usually a .wav file) can then be loaded into convolution reverb software, like the ones I mentioned above, and applied as an effect on other audio files.

Impulse responses can tell you about a space. For example, can a person standing in a busy medieval town square clearly hear actors, 50 feet away, performing an outdoor play?

That’s the kind of thing Lopez wanted to know. She studied the acoustics of a street in York, UK, for a project on the medieval York Mystery Plays. The plays were originally performed on many streets in York from the 14th to 16th centuries.  

Lopez recorded a series of impulse responses a street called Stonegate, the best-preserved site of the Mystery Plays. Using acoustical modeling software, she then built a model of Stonegate as it exists today.

Because all materials – stone, wood, hay, textiles, even live (or dead) bodies – affect the acoustics of an environment, Lopez next adjusted the model based on historical records of that location. For example, she changed the modern street pavement to other, more irregular surfaces to approximate what it might have been like several hundred years ago.  

Acoustic reconstruction uses detailed data to create approximations – no one can say what the exact acoustics were 600 years ago. Lopez’s work offers educated estimates of what it might have sounded like while the Mystery Plays were performed.

She also created an interactive website where you can experiment with her acoustic modeling: Soundscapes of the York Mystery Plays. 

What does all this mean for podcast sound design?

I’m guessing most of us aren’t acoustic archaeologists or ethnomusicologists. But when we sound design a narrative podcast scene, we share this in common with them: we understand that it’s important to create a sense of place for our audience so they can better understand the people and characters in our stories.

My Ireland trip gave me a sense of place that I didn’t have before. And though we can’t beam our listeners to other lands, we can bring them into a scene through sound, make the scene feel real to them, and bring them there figuratively. We don’t need acoustic measurements to do that. But it helps to think carefully about the setting we’re constructing for listeners.

More on that in a future issue.

Until next time,

Lori