Experiencing St. Paul’s…400 years ago

On a recent trip to London, I got to explore a lot of the sacredness and tradition that lies within the city. On my first day visiting, I was given a tour of St. Paul’s Cathedral — an incredible landmark and one of the most famous and recognizable sights of London. I’ve never been a lover of history, but this was a very special visit and it played a large role in the choice I made for which DH project to delve into.

The project I decided to reverse-engineer is called Virtual Paul’s Cross Project — one of 3 similar projects undertaken by NC State University graduate school students. The projects provides the experience of hearing John Donne’s sermon for Gunpowder Day (November 5, 1622) in Paul’s Churchyard, against the outer walls of the Cathedral. Through various dropdown menus on the project’s interactive website, users can learn about how the project came to be and listen to Donne’s sermon not only in the space it was delivered in, but from 8 different positions in the Churchyard, and even in the presence of 4 different sized crowds. The result is the experience of “an event that unfolds over time.” The project has received multiple awards, including the “Award for Best DH Data Visualization” from DH Awards in 2014. As mentioned above, the website also includes links to the two other companion projects that were undertaken as well, which I only explored a little but plan on diving in further soon. If you want to check either of those out, they are Virtual St. Paul’s Cathedral Project and Virtual Trinity Chapel Project.

The Black Box

What I found so interesting about this project is that once I’d spent time reading about it and watching the videos on the website, I started to realize it was really two different DH projects combined into one: the visual model of the Cathedral, Churchyard, Paul’s Cross, and the surrounding environment, as well as the consequential acoustic model of the space. The result is one presentation; one installation and accompanying website fusing the two, but each has its own individual sources and processes.

The Visual Model

How do you recreate a space that no longer exists? St. Paul’s underwent a massive reconstruction in the late 1600s following the Great Fire of London, but a lot was lost, including Paul’s Cross. The sources that were used to understand what this Churchyard looked like in the 1620s came in lots of different forms. Archeological and visual record of preFire St. Paul’s and its environments played a crucial role, along with drawings and engravings from the 16th and 17th centuries, a 1616 painting of the Churchyard by John Gipkin, a 1640 overhead of the Churchyard dimensions, architect Christopher Wren’s drawings and dimensions in the early 1660s (which were proposed to the Crown as reconstruction plans), numerous surveys taken of the preaching station and surrounding houses and shops, and tons of other data and resources.

The processes that were then undertaken were much more straightforward. The physical 3D model of the Cathedral et al. was created using Google SketchUp, and that model was then rendered and imported into Adobe Photoshop for detailing and shading.

The Acoustic Model

The website is very clear in stating that while the project is highly accurate, there are still elements that are impossible to have data on and recreate perfectly. An important example is John Donne himself. How do you recreate most accurately the voice of a man who died hundreds of years ago? The answer lies in their research. The basis for creating a highly accurate acoustic model of the space was the same visual model they already created. Sound engineers in Boston were able to use the model and material quality/texture of the Cathedral’s outer walls and the Churchyard to create detailed plans for what the spread of sound would look like in that space. The question then becomes, what is the exact sound that is being spread? The answer is, there are lots of them.

Beginning with John Donne, researchers needed to first know exactly what words he spoke in his Gunpowder Day sermon. A key source was a manuscript of this preaching, written by a scribe after the fact for King James, which had conveniently been corrected by John Donne himself in his own handwriting. With this text, which was as close as they could possibly come to the original words, they then met with distinguished linguists, who could reproduce a fitting early modern London accent that would have been characteristic of anyone living in the heart of the city at the time. Contemporary accounts of Donne’s preaching style revealed he was a man who could be entertaining, witty, charming, and emotionally moving among others, which gave them a sense of how he would have delivered this sermon. Finally, with John Donne’s voice ready to be reproduced, they used repeating sources and other data from the time to determine what elements of the environment would also be crucial parts of the larger soundscape — elements they would record themselves or find generic recordings of to use in the model.

With these sources, the processes for the project’s acoustic model started with recording Ben Crystal’s voice as the voice of John Donne. Having been given an adapted visual model that fit the requirements of the CATT acoustic modeling program, the sound engineers took the sound patterns they had determined from the visual model and projected Ben Crystal’s voice into the 3D space. They added reverberation to fit the geometry and textures and did the same with the varying environmental sounds. Now, with both visual and acoustic models completed to the highest degree of accuracy possible, it was time for the installation.

Presentation of Visual + Acoustic

The project was installed in the Teaching and Visualization Lab of the James B. Hunt Library on NC State University’s Centennial Campus. The installation was opened on November 5, 2013 — on the 391st anniversary of the original Gunpowder Day sermon. The visual and acoustic models were presented as one to patrons, and various researchers and contributors spoke about the process at the launch. I also read that several St. Paul’s historians and DH scholars were in attendance.

In addition to this installation, the model is presented on the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project website, available to anyone who wishes to hear this experience unfold for themselves. If you navigate to the Explore Audibility section under the “Acoustics” dropdown, you can hear for yourself what this sermon sounded like from each of the 8 locations and in the presence of all 4 differing crowds.

New Question…

The question I have after spending time with this project is one I’m sure I could figure out pretty easily, but I’ve been curious about it for a little time now and this project furthered that curiosity. What kinds of other sonic/acoustic/auditory DH projects exist out there? And what kinds of projects like these are being hypothesized? I’ve always liked sound, I think it’s a really under appreciated realm of our experience of the world, and I think it would be cool to see what sound theorists and scientists are doing with it today.

2 Discussion Questions

1. What is the goal of the project? The goal of the project (or as the website says, its purpose) is to help us explore preaching, especially in early modern London. These “performances” were once a weekly gathering and could take hours to get through because of how the preachers went about delivering their sermons, and how the crowds would respond to their expressiveness (or lack thereof). By reconstructing a space that used to be, and by studying its innate quality to learn how sound would behave inside it, you can learn a lot about why the space looks the way it does, and why it functions in that particular fashion. Acoustic Archeology is a field I’ve always been super interested in, and it can teach us as much about the history of this preaching the same way first-hand accounts can.
2. What academic fields do you see the project in conversation with? I think this is a much longer list than I’ll be able to come up with on my own, but I would say primarily: architecture, archeology, acoustic archeology, history, sound studies, music, religion, and linguistics (in no particular order, but with an emphasis on architecture and acoustic archeology).