Visualizing Sound
My project investigates medieval visualizations of acoustic phenomena in medieval manuscripts and diagrams between the 8th and the 12th centuries. Multilayered ephemeral sounds delineated liturgies and libraries, urban spaces and court cultures, diplomacy, and politics. The challenge of capturing the harmony of the spheres, harmony of the human body, and bodily produced and perceived sounds is evinced by a rich diversity of visualizations. These visualizations appear as diagrams, graphs, and line drawings using parchment, ink, and pigments.
My leading question is how we can identify, distinguish, and understand the strategies by which medieval scribes and scholars created new shapes and forms on parchment to move between dimensions. The medial differences between “temporal” sound and “spatial” imagery have often been overstated, primarily due to modern disciplinary divides. I aim to investigate how diagrams, line drawings, tables, graphs, and grids create and communicate propositional knowledge as well as applicable information while unfolding its terminologies, functions, and typologies.
