Musings

So far the content added to this journal is all from archives, field and research notes. Some of it coherent some not so and usually a process of filtering thoughts and seeing what sticks.
To date my research has mainly centred around the methodology of recording both hi-fi and lo-fi impulse responses taken from historic locations, mostly around Scotland. Boasting some fantastic castles, abbeys and cathedrals from the medieval period the continued challenge is to find ever more interesting sites in which to record and older sites from pre-antiquity. The Picts become an inviting challenge, spanning as they did the pre-Christian, Bronze Age eras, through the Roman occupation and subsequent documenting and still the best documentary evidence for our Scottish ancestors, to their integration in Christianity and influence right into the Medieval period. They do present a challenge from the point of view that there is very little architecture that they left behind in which to analyse the acoustic spaces they used and inhabited.
Earlier Scottish archaeology and the neolithic people of Scotland also present some architectural challenges, however they have left their mark and most strikingly on the Orkney Isles. Colleagues from the University of York recorded the acoustic characteristics of Maes Howe the famed neolithic dwelling on Orkney, however recent archaeological digs taking place now at the Ness of Brodgar present some real opportunities. Although little more than layers of stone foundations representing a multi-use site on the same space over millenia, acoustic models can be 'digitally built' representing the sound of the spaces as imagined by artistic renderings of sites architecture.
The site also has evidence of the ritualistic, mass slaughter of cattle and feasting and pilgrimage taking place, as a sound designer this presents a creative challenge and could even evolve into a filed of archaeoacoustics little explored to date: the design of soundscapes as our ancestors may have experienced their environment.
This is a future project I hope to undertake collaborating with others within and out the wider UHI network.