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“The
past was not a silent place,” says acoustician Damian Murphy of the University
of York in England. “Sound is a fundamental part of our human experience.”
At
Notre Dame, Katz and colleagues had a fortuitous head start. Using a computer
simulation and acoustic measurements the group made in the intact cathedral in
2013, the researchers had already digitally reproduced the building’s
reverberance. Katz is using that work to predict how choices made during the
reconstruction might alter Notre Dame’s effect on the ears.
He
can also resurrect the acoustics of Notre Dame of old, showing the impact of
renovations from previous eras in the medieval cathedral’s past, focusing on
how the building would have responded to the sounds within. Meanwhile Pardoen,
of CNRS and the Maisons des Sciences de l’Homme in Lyon, aims to re-create
those long-ago sounds.
Mylène Pardoen and Brian Katz (left to right) study the sounds of historical environments and buildings, and are helping with Notre Dame’s recovery. Here, the two visit the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, another Paris church where Katz has done acoustics research. E. Conover
Sound
is a transient, ethereal phenomenon, and it tends to be neglected in historical
records. While photographs and drawings can preserve the visual impact of a
building or scene, documenting the sonic impact of a space is more complicated.
But for many people, sound provides an intimate part of the sensation, the je
ne sais quoi of being in a particular place. Eyes closed, you can still tell
immediately whether a room is tiny or soaring and grand.
Aural history
Cathedrals are a classic study subject for heritage acoustics. But sonic scrutiny has been applied to other spaces, including other religious buildings, theaters and even prehistoric caves (SN Online: 7/6/17 ; 6/26/17 ). Murphy, for instance, has studied the acoustics of a beloved chocolate factory and an underground nuclear reactor cavern.
For
cathedrals in particular, “the sound and the feeling you get when you are
inside … is key for the character” of the buildings, says acoustic engineer
Lidia Álvarez-Morales of the University of York. She and colleagues recently
measured the acoustics of four English cathedrals, including York Minster. That
Gothic structure is larger than Notre Dame and suffered a catastrophic fire in
1984. The cathedral was later restored.
The acoustics within a room are all about how the sound reflects off the surfaces inside. When you clap your hands, for example, vibrations of air molecules travel in a wave, causing variations in pressure. Some of those waves travel directly to your ear, which registers an immediate sound. But others travel in all directions until they reach a surface such as a wall, floor or object within the room. Sound waves can bounce off that surface and reach your ear at a later time (SN: 7/13/13, p. 10 ).
In
a place with a single reflecting surface, such as the distant wall of a canyon,
the reflected waves produce an echo, a delayed repetition of the original
sound. But in a cathedral, reverberation is the rule. “Reverberation happens
when we have, say, a thousand reflections that are all coming back to us so
fast that we can’t resolve any individual one of them with our auditory
system,” says acoustician Braxton Boren of American University in Washington,
D.C. As a result, the sound is drawn out, slowly trailing off to silence over
several seconds.
Materials that tend to reflect sound waves and enhance reverberation, such as marble and limestone, are common in cathedrals. In contrast, a more typical room has surfaces — carpets, drapes and even the people within the room — that mostly absorb sound waves (SN: 11/15/03, p. 308 ). Larger rooms also boost sound’s staying power, as the waves take longer to travel between surfaces. Before the fire, with its arched limestone ceiling reaching 33 meters high and a 4,800-square-meter marble floor, Notre Dame was like a giant, mirrored fun house for sound, bouncing the waves around and around.
The
reverberation time of a room is the number of seconds it takes for an initial,
loud sound to become so quiet that it can no longer be heard. Specifically,
it’s an estimate of how long it takes a sound to fade by 60 decibels. While a
typical living room might have a reverberation time of half a second, and a
concert hall might reverberate for two seconds, cathedrals can have
reverberation times in excess of five seconds.
With
long reverberation times, fast-moving music or speech can be muddied, with
notes and words stepping on top of one another. Gothic cathedrals were designed
to be grand spaces — their long reverberation may have been a by-product. But
music evolved to fit the space: For organ music or religious chanting, “the
acoustic conditions are really good, because this kind of music has been
designed for those buildings,” Álvarez-Morales says.
In
fact, Notre Dame’s special sound may have inspired the birth of polyphonic
music — in which different voices sing separate notes, instead of the same
pitch — in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Gregorian chants sung in the
cathedral in medieval times were monophonic, featuring only one note at a time.
But the drawn-out acoustics meant that consecutive notes tended to overlap.
Some
acousticians believe this effect may have provided a chance to experiment with
which notes sounded good together, eventually developing into voices singing in
harmony. This practice is now so common it seems obvious. But at the time, it
was revolutionary. As a result, the roots of modern Western music may have been
shaped by the acoustics of Notre Dame. “It’s incredibly historically
significant,” Boren says.
Sound of silence
On the day of the fire,
Parisians gathered to watch the dramatic blaze. When Katz first heard the news,
he didn’t quite believe it. Like so many others, he decided he had to see for
himself.
Despite
the throngs, Paris was mostly silent, Katz says. “No one was really talking
above a whisper. To have that many people staring in awe was really strange.”
Katz opens his eyes wide while remembering the scene. “No one knew what to say
or what to do, but we were all standing there.”
The next day, Katz realized there was something he could do. The 2013 data his group had taken were the only detailed measurements of the acoustics of Notre Dame. He also had his computer simulation of the cathedral. Such acoustic models include the locations of the various surfaces within a room along with estimates of how well each material would absorb sound. And despite the destruction of the cathedral’s roof and medieval timbers, talk of restoring the wounded edifice had already started.
Inside
the cathedral, Katz had measured a property known as “room impulse response,”
which captures how the sound levels within a room vary over time after a brief
initial noise. From that impulse response, researchers can derive the reverberation
time and subtle characteristics that can affect how a listener perceives a
room. One such property is the length of the delay between when the first sound
waves reach a listener and the arrival of the second, reflected set of sound
waves.
In July, three months after the fire, Mylène Pardoen (shown, left), Brian Katz and others wore protective suits and breathing masks inside Notre Dame. Fallen masonry and charred timbers littered the cathedral’s floor. Both: B. Katz and M. Pardoen/CNRS
Using
these measurements of the cathedral, Katz had calibrated his computer model,
which allowed him to accurately reproduce Notre Dame’s lost acoustics. And now
he could tell architects what they needed to do to ensure the building would
maintain its acoustic splendor.
Katz
exudes a nearly constant air of bemusement, as if he can’t fully grasp the
cosmic circumstances that led him to become the foremost expert on Notre Dame’s
acoustics. With a graying beard and long wavy hair tied back in a loose knot,
his look is halfway between musician and physicist. But neither category quite
fits: He doesn’t play any instruments, and he’s not a conventional physicist.
As
a child, Katz’s attempts at learning musical instruments fizzled: He abandoned
both the cello and the saxophone. While studying physics at Brandeis University
in Waltham, Mass., Katz diverged from his college classmates, who were
fascinated with astrophysics or subatomic particles. “That wasn’t really my
thing,” Katz says: He stuck to the human scale.
Eventually,
Katz stumbled into acoustics thanks to his experience setting up sound systems
for events at Brandeis. With a Ph.D. from Penn State, he eventually became an
acoustics researcher in Paris. But he’s no audio-gear geek either. He declares
that his home audio system is “crap.”
Music from ruins
The acoustic properties of
damaged or demolished buildings have been resurrected before. Murphy and
colleagues re-created the 16th century sound of a ruined church called St.
Mary’s Abbey, founded in 1088 in York. Today, only remnants of the abbey’s
walls endure — arched windows frame sky and trees within a city park. But
Murphy and colleagues pieced together the architecture of the lost church as
best they could, consulting with archaeologists and studying historical
references. By putting that information into a computer simulation, the group
got a sense of how the space would reverberate.
In
2015, singers performed a concert within the ruins, with the original reverberation
of the abbey applied to their voices in real time. Audience members seated
within the church’s footprint heard what the music would have sounded like in
the intact space.
VIDEO
Only ruins remain of St. Mary’s Abbey in York, England. But Damian Murphy and colleagues built a computer simulation to restore the acoustic grandeur of the 16th century church. A recording made in an echo-free room begins the piece. The acoustics of another cathedral, York Minster in England, are applied after 8 seconds, and the music becomes more reverberant. At around 22 seconds, the acoustics is changed to match that reconstructed for the ruined abbey.
Like
an acoustic time machine, such techniques can also help researchers understand
how the acoustics of still-intact buildings might have differed in the past, as
a result of either renovations or differences in how the church was used or
decorated, and how that would have altered the music played within them. “For
anyone who’s fallen in love with music from another era, we can’t really
re-create it without re-creating the acoustic conditions,” Boren says.
For
example, in the 16th century Church of the Redentore in Venice, Italy, music
was composed for a special festival held each July, when citizens packed the
church. All those people could have had a big impact on the sound: Humans “are
actually one of the most absorbent surfaces,” Boren says.
The
festival still takes place today, but the church uses speakers to amplify the
music, which drastically changes the acoustics, Boren says. He wanted to
understand how the church sounded during festivals of the past.
Boren
and colleagues produced an auralization of the church, the acoustic equivalent
of a visualization. The researchers took a musical recording from a space with
very little reverberation and applied the acoustics from their simulation of
the church — both with and without the crowd.
In this simulation of the acoustics of the Church of the Redentore in Venice, sound waves bounce off the various surfaces in the building. Colors indicate how many times the waves have reflected. The time in milliseconds is indicated in the bottom right corner. Braxton Boren/American Univ.
That
involved a process called convolution, which changes how long various
frequencies hang in the air. The musical recording was broken up into tiny
slices in time, and each slice was multiplied by the room’s impulse response.
Summing up all those slices produced the final sound.
Prior
measurements had revealed that the empty church had a reverberation time of
seven seconds. But in Boren and colleagues’ simulation, reverberation time was
cut in half when the church was filled with people and decked out with festive
tapestries.
When
the church was full, sounds didn’t ring out as long, so the notes came through
more clearly. In the past, when composers wrote music for the Venice landmark,
they may have taken the room’s reverberation time into account, including the
effects of the crowd.
The
work was made easier by the fact that the building the team was studying is
intact, and the researchers had measurements from within. Whereas Murphy’s team
had to use a fair bit of guesswork to simulate the ruined St. Mary’s Abbey,
Boren’s group used its data to ensure the simulation faithfully re-created the
building’s sound. The same goes for Katz’s Notre Dame simulation, which is why
his prefire measurements are so crucial.
“It’s
incredibly lucky that Brian [Katz] was able to get into that space and take all
the measurements that he did,” Boren says. “Those are going to be very critical
for actually isolating what the acoustics of Notre Dame were like before.”
The measure of a cathedral
On April 24, 2013, six
years before the fire and 850 years after Notre Dame’s first stone was laid,
Katz and colleagues arrived at the cathedral lugging microphones and other
equipment. Late that night, after a concert had ended and the last of the
musicians and concertgoers had spilled out into the spring evening, Katz and
his team got to work.
Microphones
stood like silent sentinels in the centuries-old aisles. Orange and black
cables threaded through walkways. A laptop rested on a chair — a seat normally
occupied by the faithful now reserved for technology. And a dummy of a human
head outfitted with microphones in its ears perched on a post, its blank face
surveying the ornate surroundings.
Brian Katz took detailed acoustic measurements in Notre Dame in 2013, using microphones on stands and a dummy head. These benchmark data will help reveal how rebuilding could alter the cathedral’s sound. B. Katz/CNRS
To
precisely pin down Notre Dame’s room impulse response, Katz’s group played a
sound called a sine sweep, which starts on a low note and slides gradually up
to a higher pitch. It’s designed to test the full range of pitches that humans
can hear, because different pitches can reverberate for different lengths of
time.
Microphones
measured the cathedral’s response to the sine sweep. That response varies based
on where in a room the sound is coming from, and where the microphone is. So
the researchers moved the speaker and microphones from place to place,
repeating the measurements. Using that data, Katz calculated that Notre Dame’s
reverberation time was around six seconds on average — more than 10 times as
long as a typical living room’s. The reverberation time varied depending on the
pitch; for a note of middle C, the reverberation lasted eight seconds.
Tuning up
Next, Katz and colleagues
turned to the computer simulation, comparing the simulated reverberation with
the reverberation they measured in the cathedral. The results were close, but
didn’t quite match for all frequencies of sound. That’s to be expected: Notre
Dame’s walls might be a little better or worse at absorbing sound than a
typical limestone wall, for example. So Katz and colleagues tweaked the amount
of absorption of various surfaces until the acoustic properties of the
simulated cathedral aligned with reality.
The
researchers then made an auralization of Notre Dame, using audio from the
concert that took place in Notre Dame the night that Katz made his
measurements. That concert, a performance of “La Vierge,” composed by Jules
Massenet in the late 19th century, was recorded with microphones positioned
very close to the performers. The mics picked up mostly direct sound rather
than the cathedral’s reverberation. Katz used his computer model to re-create
how the concert would have sounded for a listener wandering through other parts
of the church.
Next, Katz and colleagues added visuals to that audio to make a virtual reality re-creation of the performance , which they call “Ghost Orchestra .” They reported the work at the European Acoustics Association’s EuroRegio conference in 2016. Wearing a virtual-reality headset, the viewer flies about the simulated cathedral as the music plays, swooping low over the orchestra. In the far reaches of the building, the individual notes are more muddied. Turn your head, and as your ears move positions, the sound changes too. Since the fire, Katz and colleagues have been working on improvements to the video.
VIDEO
A virtual reality simulation of a concert in Notre Dame, a work-in-progress by Brian Katz and colleagues, re-creates the acoustics of the church. In this clip from the 360-degree video, the sound changes as the viewer moves around the cathedral.
Brian Katz and David Poirier-Quinot/CNRS, Sorbonne University
Moving
forward, Katz plans to tweak his model to account for the design and materials
to be used in the proposed cathedral refurbishments. Even relatively minor
choices — such as whether to carpet some of the aisles — could create a
noticeable difference. Katz also aims to adjust his model to understand how
Notre Dame may have sounded in the past, cataloging its progression through a
series of changes. Some of the past renovations could have altered the
cathedral’s acoustics, even cosmetic changes like coatings of paint and the
hanging of tapestries or artwork.
No
building stands for 850-plus years without damage, refurbishments and aesthetic
tweaks. Once Notre Dame’s construction began in 1163, it continued off and on
for almost 200 years, until the middle of the 14th century. In 1699, King Louis
XIV started a round of updates, including a new marble altar, with statues of
himself and his father flanking the Virgin Mary holding Jesus’ dead body.
During
the French Revolution, statues were beheaded, and the church was used as a
warehouse, falling into disrepair. Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of
Notre Dame was published in 1831 and may have inspired Parisians to give the
cathedral some TLC. Beginning in 1845, renovations led by architect
Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc shored up the crumbling structure and added the
cathedral’s spire (destroyed by the 2019 fire), among other changes. The fire
is believed to have broken out accidentally during restoration work.
Crafting a soundscape
One thing Katz can’t do is
reproduce the actual sounds that might have been present in those earlier eras.
That’s the specialty of Pardoen, Katz’s companion on the July visit to the
damaged Notre Dame. Calling herself a “soundscape archaeologist,” Pardoen pieces
together the sounds of past environments: battlefields, cathedrals and cities.
With
close-cropped gray hair and dark clothes, Pardoen seems no-nonsense. But
chatting with Katz over coffee, she breaks the veneer of seriousness by
frequently interrupting the conversation to mimic the noises she studies, like
the “choo click choo click” of a loom or the “crrrrrr” of stone cutters.
Her
magnum opus is a video soundscape of central Paris during the second half of
the 18th century, when Paris streets bustled with people, and bridges were crammed
with buildings several stories high. In the video, the viewer wanders the city
streets, taking in the sounds: the clacking of horse hooves, washerwomen working
at the banks of the Seine, leatherworkers engaged in their craft and even the
buzzing of flies around the fish market.
VIDEO
Mylène Pardoen recreated the soundscape of 18th century Paris, using historical documents and maps. Pardoen records her sounds as accurately as possible, using replicas of artisans’ tools of the time, for example.
Projet Bretez/CNRS
To
cultivate this sonic bouquet, Pardoen consulted maps, historical documents and
paintings. She found replicas of the tools that would have been common at the
time and recorded them in use to collect historically accurate sounds.
Now,
Pardoen plans to exhume the forgotten sounds of Notre Dame. Rather than
re-creating religious ceremonies or concerts, she’ll focus on the everyday noises.
In earlier times, artisans and merchants crowded the neighborhood around the
cathedral, and the resulting cacophony leaked into the church’s interior. By
filtering these sounds through Katz’s acoustic model, Pardoen and Katz aim to
achieve the ambience of Notre Dame at various periods of its history.
As the cleanup progresses, Katz and Pardoen will return regularly to monitor the acoustics of the damaged building. The two are part of a group — Association des Scientifiques au Service de la Restauration de Notre-Dame de Paris , the Association of Scientists in the Service of the Restoration of Notre Dame of Paris — that aims to consolidate scientific expertise to better understand the cathedral and assist in its reconstruction.
Parisians
will have to decide which version of the cathedral to aim for, the Notre Dame
that existed just before the fire, a version from an earlier era or something
new and different. Giving architects, politicians and the public a chance to
explore the sonic history of Notre Dame could help inform decisions about its
future.
“No historic building is ever completely static,” says Murphy, of the University of York. “This terrible fire, which is a considerable tragedy, is just the next stage in the life of Notre Dame.”