The Soundscape of Process: An Audio Recreation of Lifecasting in the Workshop

Elliot Zayas and Mac Waters, Fall 2021

In the introduction to his history of audio reproduction technologies, Jonathan Sterne outlines the supposed supremacy of visual concerns in many of the primary cultural academic disciplines. From the obsession with the “gaze” to the primacy of the visual object, visual cultures have dominated scholarship for centuries. Musicologist Kate Galloway expands this observation to the recent developments of the digital humanities, noting that “the digital humanities continues to be astonishingly silent” (Galloway, 47), prioritizing visual and literary scholarship. Over the past decade or so, Galloway notes that “Soundwork” has slowly begun to creep into digital humanities fields not necessarily in the form of sound or music-based scholarship, but in the presence of actual sound objects that are created using recording and sound analysis technologies. These objects are not scholarship that is meant to be read in an academic journal, but rather experienced by listeners interactively—such objects are meant to be heard. The primary pedagogical point of these objects, Galloway writes, is to aid in holistic digital storytelling. By increasing the level of sensory experience in historical reconstructions, Soundwork can help modern scholars engage with public audiences through multisensory narratives, providing unique insight into the sonic experiences of historical situations, environments, and events.

Interacting with these sonic objects enables a new medium of engaging with historical materials: the historical soundscape. Though much of this scholarship is being pursued by urban musicologists interested in recreating particular musical environments from mostly pre-modern urban societies, one project stands out as an outlier example of the recreation of an extramusical event: NC State’s Virtual Paul’s Cross Project. In an effort to visualize and sonically recreate John Donne’s 1622 Gunpowder Day sermon at the courtyard of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project utilizes a myriad of digital architectural modeling software, sound recreation technology, and evidence-based restoration techniques to allow scholars to experience an accurate, multisensory digital representation of a historical event. The introduction to Karin Bijsterveld’s book on historical soundscapes outlines that such recreations—that is, recreations of events/environments/situations before 1900—operate through textual mediation: “Our knowledge of past soundscapes, transient and intangible as they are, is therefore largely dependent on historical texts in which people described what they heard and what these sounds meant to them… And it is this mediated cultural heritage of sound that presents us with a unique chance to study the dramatization of urban sound” (Bijsterveld, 6). These projects thus use various textual and contextual clues (i.e., historical documents, diary entries, artistic representations, etc.) to piece together a mediated soundscape that attempts to create an immersive, approximate historical experience.

Inspired by North Carolina State University’s “Virtual Paul’s Cross Project’’ and other digital soundscape recreations of historical environments, “The Soundscape of Process” is an audio recreation of the sounds of an Early Modern workshop, specifically of the process of lifecasting a rose based on the instructions of Ms. Fr. 640. Using Emily Cockayne’s assertion of the noisiness of early modern urban environments, as well as the proliferation and importance of sound in the artisan’s workshop in the context of urban environments, we place Ms. Fr. 640 into a possible context: the urban workshop. The author practitioner of Ms. Fr. 640 has over 300 entries dedicated to some form of casting, with at least three references to casting a flower. While there are several research essays detailing the reconstruction of these recipes, the honing and modification of required techniques, and even the significance of rendering something temporary as permanent, there is little to no documentation of the importance of sound in a craftsman’s workshop. This project aims not only to capture as accurately as possible the sounds that would be present in the workshop throughout a lifecasting, but to add to the written and visual documentation surrounding both this recipe and others in a general sense. The manuscript becomes the primary text to mediate the experience of sound in an early modern workshop. The combination of several different recipes found in the manuscript was required in order to gain a more holistic understanding of the total process, starting with the creation of the mold to the assemblage of the final metal product. Additionally, images and videos from the Making and Knowing Project’s Flickr, as well as a research essay on “Molding a Rose” and various field notes, were consulted for further particular details. Below is a detailed description of each step of the lifecasting process, the sounds produced in each step, the materials necessary for recreation, and which folio is referenced. Also included with each step is a written description in an anecdotal style of an artisan (such as the author practitioner) moving through the instructions with special attention paid to words indicative of sound and noise.

We recommend listening to the audio samples with high-quality stereo headphones, as this helps to transport the listener to the 3-D spatial configuration of our early modern workshop.

Creating the mold

Upon entering the workshop to begin the life casting process, the artisan must first gather the materials for constructing a mold. He must acquire his scissors and thread found in various drawers. Milling about his workshop, he first begins with kneading and manipulating clay into the desired mold shape, slamming the clay down on his table to remove any air bubbles first. He then takes the rose which he has already prepared and fastens it within the mold, securing it with wax sprues and thread, if necessary, and snipping away any excess leaves or petals. He will have most likely prepared the sand which is to be poured into the mold on a different day, but if not, he will first mix the different dry sands to create a cohesive mixture, perhaps having to grind up larger pieces of brick or plaster with a mortar and pestle. Then he mixes the dry sand with water and pours it into the mold. Once everything is secured, he lets it set and dry, then heats it with a large fire until the plant has turned to ash. As it heats, the wax melts and drips out, the organic material dries and burns, and the clay mold itself solidifies. Once the heating is done, the artisan removes the sand and ash from the mold, forcefully blowing to make sure no granules remain, and he is left with a hardened mold ready for casting.

Casting the metal

Now it is time to cast the metal into the prepared mold. The artisan must first get out all materials necessary for this step, rummaging through his many bins and drawers full of metal vessels, tongs, etc. He then heats the metal over a high temperature fire until it is liquid, and then carefully pours the metal into the mold. The metal cools and settles, filling the workshop with sounds of crackling and sizzling.

Recovering the final product

After the metal has cooled, it is time for the artisan to recover the final product. Using a hammer, he must break open the clay mold carefully, but with enough force that the mold shatters and reveals the metal product within. This may produce a great deal of noise depending on how difficult it is to break the mold. If the casting was done in multiple parts, the artisan will also have to melt more metal and solder it together. Once this is done, the final product will be complete!

General sounds throughout

Bibliography:

Bijsterveld, Karin. “Introduction.” In Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage. transcript Verlag, 2013.

Cockayne, Emily. “Noisy.” In Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600-1770. Yale University Press, 2008.

Chiostrini, Giulia and Jef Palframan. “Molding a Rose.” In Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, edited by Making and Knowing Project, Pamela H. Smith, Naomi Rosenkranz, Tianna Helena Uchacz, Tillmann Taape, Clément Godbarge, Sophie Pitman, Jenny Boulboullé, Joel Klein, Donna Bilak, Marc Smith, and Terry Catapano. New York: Making and Knowing Project, 2020. https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/essays/ann_022_sp_15. DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.7916/17zd-7y45

Galloway, Kate. “Making and Learning with Environmental Sound: Maker Culture, Ecomusicology, and the Digital Humanities in Music History Pedagogy." J. Music Hist. Pedagogy 8 (2017): 45-71.

Sterne, Jonathan Edward. “Introduction” In The Audible past: Modernity, Technology, and the Cultural History of Sound. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1999.

Taape, Tillmann. “The Body and the Senses in Ms. Fr. 640: Towards a ‘Material Sensorium.’” In Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, edited by Making and Knowing Project, Pamela H. Smith, Naomi Rosenkranz, Tianna Helena Uchacz, Tillmann Taape, Clément Godbarge, Sophie Pitman, Jenny Boulboullé, Joel Klein, Donna Bilak, Marc Smith, and Terry Catapano. New York: Making and Knowing Project, 2020. https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/essays/ann_302_ie_19. DOI https://www.doi.org/10.7916/027y-d055

“Virtual Paul’s Cross Website.” Virtual Paul’s Cross Website, https://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/.