Talk:Archaeoacoustics

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Should there be a citation after "Although many scientists have claimed to have succeeded in finding sounds from ancient pottery"? Fonny (talk) 12:24, 28 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Misleading article?[edit]

As far as I can tell, this word has been used hardly at all except as the title of the one book. For Wikipedia to state that it is a field seems misleading. 86.182.222.189 (talk) 23:53, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Google Scholar has quite a few hits with "archaeoacoustics" in the title. I think the way in which the word "field" is used isn't really misleading: "This is an interdisciplinary field which includes areas such as archaeology, ethnomusicology, acoustics and digital modelling, and that is a part of the wider field of Music Archaeology." It's in a conversational tone (doesn't look like a formal definition), and it's also identified as a subfield of something. So I wouldn't read the word as a field in the narrowest, most pedantic sense. But maybe you can think of a better word to use here? We can't call it a "niche" or anything like that as that wouldn't be a neutral description. Hans Adler 00:09, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

removing PROD[edit]

I've contested the PROD for this page... however, I still have serious concerns about the current state of this article. Preliminary searches on Google Books and Google Scholar indicate that the term is at least a legitimate one used in scholarly works, but I do not know that it's being used in the same way as in those sources. Frankly, it sounds a lot like a WP:FRINGE theory. We do have articles on scientific fringe theories, of course, but the article would need to be re-written in a fairly major way to reflect that properly. I've had this page on my watchlist for a while because it struck me as a bit suspicious the first time I read it and I had hoped that I would get up the gumption to investigate it more thoroughly. That hasn't happened and I'm not sure it will happen any time soon. Still, IMO, this article needs a rewrite, not a deletion. Matt Deres (talk) 13:42, 9 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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Archaeoacoustics - some thoughts from the field[edit]

19 July 2018‎ :
As someone who has worked a reasonable amount in Archaeoacoustics, Professor Rupert Till of the University of Huddersfield, I thought I would share a few words. Music Archaeology is a field that has existed for over 40 years. Archaeoacoustics emerged from the work of Fagg on the acoustics of caves, and on lithopones. The term emerged from a book by Chris Scarre and Graham Lawson, a collection of papers on the subject. Chris Scarre is one of the world's leading prehistoric archaeologists, is editor of one of archaeology's leading journals, Antiquity, and was head of the department of archaeology at Durham University until recently. Durham is rated number 1 for research in Archaeology in the official REF. Lawson is faculty member at Cambridge University's Macdonald Institute. A conference they hosted led to the publication. There are numerous papers and other publications. The work on Lithophonics of Ian Cross at Oxford, work at Stanford, the Archaeoacoustics conferences and book published by Old Temples Foundation. My own work on the Hypogeum in Malta in Antiquity, and our paper in the Journal of the American Society of Acoustics on cave acoustics. The Odeon project by Jian Kang and others. All of this work is by well renowned academics. The field is part of the growing interest in multi-sensory archaeology. I tend to use the term Sound Archaeology, but archaeoacoustics is well recognised.

The idea of extracting sound from pottery is of course nonsense, and included on the wikipedia as I suppose a reference to a now mostly debunked myth. I don't want to edit the page, as I am referred to too much in the page.

The reference to "Prehistoric music" is irrelevant, sound in prehistory is of more particular interest. I would refer you to this paper

https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.4998721

which provides evidence through statistical logistic regression analysis of relationship between Cave Art placement and acoustics.

Thanks for the ref :) and for the warning about the pottery (which I think should go in prehistoric music rather than here - if some good refs come up). Pueblopassingby (talk) 21:23, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
P.S.: any more recent news (available online if poss) about the bluestone/ringing stones/dolerite in particular? What makes them ring more than others? High proportion of crystalline structures, inducing high level of diffusion? If that, does it need to be allied with something else?
Thanks for the answer, if you come back by here... (I'm doing the fr version, here for now, pretty soon in main space and then it'll be linked to the en page via left panel) Pueblopassingby (talk) 21:31, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Additional Sources[edit]

Hello all, I'd like to contribute more seminal sources to the field of archeoacoustics below, in the hopes that we can flesh out this article more thoroughly and bring it up to a similar standard as other acoustics topics on Wikipedia.

Caves and acoustics:

The following is one of the first articles published on the correlation between acoustics and the location of art within paleolithic caves, by researcher Iegor Reznikoff (already cited on the page). He has remained active in the field, and has published additional English-language papers on the same topic (one provided for context).

Reznikoff, Iegor. (1987). (On the sound dimension of paleolithic painted caves).. Comptes Rendus - Academie des Sciences, Serie II. 304. 153-156.

Reznikoff, Iegor. (2008). ‘Sound resonance in prehistoric times: A study of Paleolithic painted caves and rocks’, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 123, no. 5, pp. 3603–3603, doi: 10.1121/1.2934773.


Since Reznikoff, other researchers have continued his work, including: D. E. Commins, Y. Coppens, and T. Hidaka, ‘Acoustics of the Lascaux cave and its facsimile Lascaux IV’, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 148, no. 2, pp. 918–924, Aug. 2020, doi: 10.1121/10.0001724.


Archeoacoustic reconstruction of heritage sites or buildings: A topic not currently covered on the page, but of recent interest in the research community. Has connections to computational acoustics, computer simulation, virtual reality, and auralization in addition to the obvious archeoacoustics.

H. Autio, M. Barbagallo, C. Ask, D. Bard Hagberg, E. Lindqvist Sandgren, and K. Strinnholm Lagergren, ‘Historically Based Room Acoustic Analysis and Auralization of a Church in the 1470s’, Applied Sciences, vol. 11, no. 4, p. 1586, Feb. 2021, doi: 10.3390/app11041586.

B. Postma and B. F. G. Katz, ‘Creation and calibration method of acoustical models for historic virtual reality auralizations’, Virtual Reality, vol. 19, no. 3–4, pp. 161–180, Nov. 2015, doi: 10.1007/s10055-015-0275-3.

B. Postma, A. Tallon, and B. Katz, Calibrated auralization simulation of the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés for historical study. 2015.

B. Boren, D. Abraham, R. Naressi, E. Grzyb, B. Lane, and D. Merceruio, ‘Acoustic simulation of Bach’s performing forces in the Thomaskirche’, p. 6 pages, 2019, doi: 10.25836/SASP.2019.39.

M. Sender, A. Planells, R. Perelló, J. Segura, and A. Giménez, ‘Virtual acoustic reconstruction of a lost church: application to an Order of Saint Jerome monastery in Alzira, Spain’, Journal of Building Performance Simulation, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 369–390, May 2018, doi: 10.1080/19401493.2017.1340975.

A. Planells, J. Segura, A. Barba, S. Cerdá, A. Giménez, and R. M. Cibrián, ‘Virtual Acoustic Reconstruction of the Church at the Lost Monastery of Santa Maria de la Murta’, in Augmented and Virtual Reality, vol. 8853, L. T. De Paolis and A. Mongelli, Eds. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2014, pp. 457–464. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-13969-2_37.

A. Pedrero, A. Díaz-Chyla, C. Díaz, S. Pelzer, and M. Vorländer, ‘Virtual restoration of the sound of the Hispanic Rite’, in Forum Acusticum, Krakow, Sep. 2014, p. 5.

L. Alvarez-Morales, A. Alvarez-Corbacho, M. Lopez and P. Bustamante, "The Acoustics of Ely Cathedral’s Lady Chapel: a study of its changes throughout history," 2021 Immersive and 3D Audio: from Architecture to Automotive (I3DA), 2021, pp. 1-9, doi: 10.1109/I3DA48870.2021.9610837.

F. Martellotta, and L. Álvarez-Morales. (2014). Virtual acoustic reconstruction of the church of Gesú in Rome: a comparison between different design options. 10.13140/2.1.1789.7924.


SuddenBowsprit (talk) 23:00, 29 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]