Computational acoustic musicology ............................................................................................................................................................ Braxton B. Boren Audio Technology, Department of Performing Arts, American University, USA ....................................................................................................................................... Abstract While the challenge of historical reconstruction of past musical performances is not a fully solved problem, not all the elements are equally unknown, or of equal magnitude. Despite some uncertainty about the interpretation of individual per- formers on specific dates, scholarship can still inform other factors of greater perceptual importance, leading to a good approximation of historical perform- ances. In addition to performance style and period instruments, computer simu- lations make it possible to also account for the acoustics of the period performance space. In addition, the most accurate reconstruction should simu- late the room’s acoustics in real time for the performers, thus retaining the feedback mechanisms of room response on performance practice. ................................................................................................................................................................................. 1 Introduction The study of history, as with most of human cul- ture, prizes visual cues over auditory ones. This is partly due to the neurological priority given to visual inputs and partly because very little auditory data are encoded into the archaeological or histor- ical record. Because of this, our common concep- tion of history is reduced to something like a picture-book of frozen images in time. However, the auditory system has a much greater resolution in the time domain than the visual system, and be- cause of this auditory cues are a primary way in which we experience the flow of time. If it were possible to hear the past, it would be a valuable means to understand the lives of people in the past by experiencing time as a transient, flowing medium rather than a series of famous paintings in a history book. Since hearing events from the past is quite difficult, this constitutes a major prob- lem for our ability to holistically understand history. Until the advent of sound recording in the late 19th century, there were almost no records of historical sound events, with the notable exception of musical scores. Among those who are drawn to the study of phil- osophy, science, mathematics, and music, it is not uncommon to detect a theoretical or highly ab- stracted approach to the subject matter that needs only enough detail to create a general model. In the case of music, these idealists have often been seques- tered in their own sub-field, appropriately titled Music Theory. This approach treasures the ability to look at an entire score and ‘hear’ it in one’s head without playing an instrument or recording. Yet music is fundamentally an auditory phenomenon, and the concept of hearing a score in one’s head only works if many unstated assumptions are granted about the context of the music in question. Indeed, one working definition of early music might well be music whose context is sufficiently different from our own, such that a score alone is insufficient to recon- struct the music in its entirety (Kuijken, 2013). Since this notation is not sufficient, what other elements are necessary to be able to hear early music? The other obvious candidates that have received a lot of attention are the instruments being used (including their tuning) (Donington, 1973; Addington, 1984) and the performers them- selves (Gotlieb and Konec ˇni, 1985; Kuijken, 2013). The use of live performers, and the inherent Correspondence: Braxton B. Boren, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20016, USA. E-mail: boren@american.edu Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 34, No. 4, 2019. ß The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EADH. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 707 doi:10.1093/llc/fqy073 Advance Access published on 24 December 2018 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article-abstract/34/4/707/5258907 by American University Law Library user on 28 January 2020