King’s Road, the Minisink Path, and the site of the Rose Inn still existed, if you knew where to look for them, the sounds of eighteenth-century Bethlehem had vanished. How could we represent the acoustic environments that had once characterized life in Moravian communities? Were those soundscapes irrecoverable? Sometimes, when faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem, it helps to return to where you started. If we could map eighteenth-century Bethlehem, for instance, by using extant historic buildings, then we could also enter those buildings to learn more about how they operated as acoustic spaces. In addition, there are twelve museums in modern-day Bethlehem dedicated to historic preservation and education about the city’s Moravian past. Their collections house historic tools and implements, musical instruments, and other elements of Moravian material culture that once contributed to its soundscapes. And, every Thursday through Saturday, Bethlehem’s current blacksmith, Philip Trabel, utilizes the forge in the rebuilt blacksmith shop to make horseshoes, nails, and other metal products. Perhaps the sounds of Bethlehem had not entirely vanished. It would be possible, at least, to conduct acoustic studies and produce field recordings in some locations.
We began by recording the plantation bell at Burnside Plantation, a former Moravian farm that is now a museum on the outskirts of Bethlehem. We also obtained permission to do field recordings of hymn singing inside of the Old Chapel, the worship spaces in the Single Sisters’ House and Gemeinhaus, and to record Trabel’s work in the blacksmith shop.62 During the process of field recording, we also collected decibel readings at approximately five-foot intervals from the sound sources (singers, bells, forge). Then, we processed the readings through a mathematical formula for understanding sound decay over distance. The particular formula we chose was capable of taking into account various types of landscapes in Bethlehem over which sound might have traveled, including agricultural fields, coniferous and deciduous forests, grass lands, shrub lands (low trees and bushes), water, and urban or built environments. Our assessment of the historical topography around Bethlehem was based on a 1758 map by the Moravian cartographer Christian Gottlieb Reuter. Reuter helpfully designated varying terrains by type on the map, including particular species of trees. The resulting “sound boundary” maps, which can be found on the website under chapter 2, allowed us to understand what the geographic limits of Bethlehem’s soundscapes might have been, and how people might have understood the boundaries of their community by listening.63
We also wanted to represent sounds and places that were no longer present, and for which it was not possible to create field recordings. In seeking to replicate the diversity of acoustic environments and perceptions of sound that once existed in eighteenth-century Bethlehem, we took advantage of the spatial frameworks provided by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software and aural cartography or sound mapping.64 We had already collected the spatial data necessary to reconstruct the built environment of Bethlehem, so it was only one further step to add sound to the maps. We felt that sound maps held great potential for offering the multisensorial approach to historic space that characterized daily life in Bethlehem. They could also allow us to reconstruct some sense of the Moravians’ cultural, social, and aesthetic perceptions of sound. Placing sounds within a spatial framework, such as a map could, we hoped, permit readers to explore new experiential and interpretive frameworks for understanding past soundscapes. However, it perhaps goes without saying that there were inherent challenges involved in this idea of reconstructed and experiential soundscapes, not least of which was the problem of how exactly to represent acoustic environments that no longer existed.65 In the case of the sound maps created for the Moravian Soundscapes website, we turned to the work of electronic composers and sound designers for inspiration. Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp’s “imaginary soundscapes” or “virtual or simulated soundscapes” became the framing methodology for creating the sounded portions of the project.66 In their work as electronic composers, both Truax and Westerkamp have simulated past acoustic environments through “soundscape compositions” created from digitally layered field recordings or prerecorded sound samples, generating what Truax has termed a “representation of acoustic environments.”67
In the case of our sound maps, we created soundscape compositions from field recordings of available industrial and agricultural machinery recorded in Bethlehem. Some of the hymns that are layered into the soundscapes are also field recordings. Other hymns, and the Mohican and German dialogues and sermons that are also represented on the website, were recorded in a studio. However, since the soundscapes of Bethlehem itself have changed dramatically since the eighteenth century, we also used digitally sampled environmental and historical sounds from the sound libraries of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). These sound libraries were originally recorded by BBC recording engineers for film and radio broadcasts, and represent the soundscapes of various natural places and communities around the world. Of particular interest for our purposes was the BBC sound libraries’ “Industrial Sounds” collection that preserves the sounds of rare historic machines and tools such as a wooden lathe, a double-handled wood saw, and even a butter churn. Each sound file was available as a 16/44.1kHz stereo audio sample, and multitrack editing of these samples into soundscape compositions facilitated the recreation of the Moravians’ acoustic environments. The end result was a series of historically informed electronic compositions that provided a descriptive sense of historic acoustic environments.68
For researchers interested in historic sound, soundscape compositions offer a model for reconstructing past soundscapes that simulate a coherent sense of an acoustic environment, even if formulated through the historical imagination of a composer. Both soundscape compositions and the performance or recording of past musical repertories stem from the desire to “sound” or to recreate historic aural experiences from an informed and academically rigorous perspective. Like other modes of historical performance, soundscape compositions are modern experiences and can only speculatively represent historical audible phenomena. Just as we can’t know exactly how a particular musical tradition was articulated by practitioners in the past, we can still strive to create modern renderings that are informed and informative.
What can we learn from re-sounding past acoustic environments? What are the advantages or disadvantages of such historical recreations? What insights do we stand to gain from the spatial humanities and sound mapping? In the case of Moravian Soundscapes, GIS technologies and sound mapping have been invaluable research methodologies in creating both the book and the maps. They have allowed me to more accurately convey the inherent emphasis in Moravian communities on sound, and sound maps have allowed me to directly, rather than abstractly, represent the sounds of places such as Bethlehem. They have also helped me to articulate the often intangible and elusive qualities of the Moravians’ sounded religious spaces and musical traditions. This has been especially important in my attempts to represent Moravians’ spiritual understandings of sound. According to composer Isobel Anderson, sound maps are particularly useful for mapping the “in-between spaces” of culture and society—the imagined and invisible relationships that constitute human experience of sound in the past and present.69 Moravian communities existed as much in sound as they did in space. This type of spiritual understanding of sound is certainly not unique to the Moravians. But as scholars studying religious traditions of music, we are often tasked with representing conceptions of sound and space that are imaginative, theoretical, and spiritual. In our attempts to document the soundways of religious communities, we often discover that ideas about sound are more important than the sounds themselves. Sound maps are just one way we might more deeply explore the sensory and imaginative aspects of religious traditions and communities, whether historical or contemporary.
Sensory data and knowledge can also be an important part of the research process itself. Since my background is in musical performance, my approach to historical research on music and sound has been greatly influenced by musicologist Elisabeth Le Guin’s
