'Space, Place, Sound, and Memory: Immersive Experiences of the Past’, is an AHRC-funded project which uses Virtual Reality to reconstruct historical performances in historical performance spaces. It seeks to recover the intangible, ephemeral elements of historical performances which, until now, have been lost to time: the sound of music within a space, how it reverberates through an ancient concert hall or chapel, and how it feels to experience this in multi-media with the play of candle light on richly decorated sculptures and walls.
The project has recreated two spaces, St Cecilia’s Hall – the oldest purpose-built concert hall in Scotland – and the chapel of Linlithgow Palace, the great Pleasure Place of the Kings and Queens of Scotland. The project team has used lidar scanning and worked with archaeologists and historians, to recreate how these buildings once looked, from architectural changes such as re-building ceilings or putting back pillars, to reconstructing how they were once decorated.
Once the buildings were reconstructed, the team assigned materials to each part of the computer model allowing them to use acoustic ray tracing to model how sound would have acted in the spaces, recreating the original acoustics of the buildings. They then could drop appropriate music recorded entirely without natural acoustics into the reconstructed spaces.
Having run detailed scientific assessments of thier models, comparing the VR recreation of one of the spaces in the present day to the real space, the team were able to demonstrate that there is almost no perceptible difference between the VR models and reality. They are confident that their recreation of the spaces in the past is very close to how the spaces would have sounded.
Later this year the project team will be recording the first commercial classical CD recorded in VR with Hyperion and The Binchois Consort, presenting a selection of music for Linlithgow Palace in a reconstructed acoustic, with a companion VR app. The finished recreations will also soon be available to the public to use in St Cecilia’s Hall, Linlithgow Palace, and Historic Environment Scotland’s Engine Shed.
