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WHATSOUND: Soundscapes of Rosenborg is an innovative research project aiming at listening, hearing and reconstructing the soundscapes of the Danish court. How did the past sound and what can we learn about the court by studying its soundscape? The court is a privileged space to study etiquette, privacy, gender, and rituals through its sonic aspects. I argue that sound played a crucial role in the appropriation, display, and control of power in those spaces. Speaking or producing sound at court was ultimately a political performance and established protocols of rank, power, and distance. For example, the notions of inside and outside, along with public and private, will be extended: the sound of bickering inside a private room could be heard in the public sphere, just as the sound of music played in public penetrated the private sphere. Aurality, or the shared hearing of written texts, defines a community and includes not only the royal families, but also servants and visitors across several social classes along with animals, carriages, kitchens and food, gardens, entertainments, and music. One part of SOUND will specifically focus on gender and women’s voices at court, including families and children, but also the royal mistresses and morganatic marriages. Studying illegitimate relations sheds light on female agency in a context of transgression and also reveals by contrast what was considered the norm in legitimate marital relations. Did women have specific sonic practices and, if so, how did they differ from male ones?Funded by Danske Frie Forskningsfond Project 2, SOUND is hosted at the Centre for Privacy Studies and I work in close collaboration with Rosenborg castle and the royal collection.The Winter Room of Christian IV had four acoustical conduits built between the cellar and the room. Musicians placed in the cellar would play and the visitors were amazed by hearing what they called “invisible music”Detail of an sonic conduit[audio wav="http://privacy.hypotheses.org/files/2020/09/437640__dorhel__early-music-group-tuning-mp3cut.net_.wav"][/audio]WHYHistorians seldom use their ears and including sound in historical research brings a complete change of perspective. SOUND will be the first sonic history of court. A focus on sound will provide a new comprehensive analysis of courtly life, by including dimensions that often fly under the radar, such as everyday practices, connections between higher and lower class inhabitants, and gender roles. I will challenge perspectives of space based first and foremost on vision, which is fixed, immediate, and implies distance and perspective. On the other hand, sound is immersive and dynamic; it travels through time and space and therefore involves temporality and humans. I argue that sound also brings a central focus on the body as one of its main producers, and will allow us to consider issues of gender along with social, cultural, and political meaning. Moreover, a soundscape is shared by the community of people hearing the same sounds. However, people can feel both unisonance and dissonance, by hearing the same soundscape but interpreting it diffently, according to their social level or gender. It is my hypothesis, that soundscapes can create a form of exclusion (who can hear the king and who cannot), but they are also inclusive and reach across social classes. The eyes can be closed; on the other hand, the ears cannot: the king cannot prevent his servants from hearing music, secret conversations, or a quarrel.SOUND may incite an awareness of the relationship between space and sound, but also between noise and silence. Modern post-industrial societies and the media have profoundly altered the relationship between sound and privacy. SOUND will offer analytical tools that enable us to approach these concerns. SOUND will certainly bring new insights into private and public spaces and the overlaps between them. The porosity of sound and its power to cross physical boundaries allows us to consider outdoor sounds that penetrate indoor spaces, but also indoor sounds that spill outside, expanding into surrounding areas. Bringing sound into historical studies creates a change in paradigm: what was once fixed has become dynamic, what was silent can be heard. This new approach will certainly be fruitful, and could therefore be applied to a variety of other spaces from our past and foster a prolific and new research path for sonic history.Athanasius Kircher, Phonurgia nova (1673), system for transmitting sound as a speaking statue.[audio wav="http://privacy.hypotheses.org/files/2020/09/193812__geoneo0__four-voices-whispering-6.wav"][/audio]HOWReconstructing soundscapes that no longer exists and listening to it is a challenge. The sound of the past is irremediably lost, along with listening habits. However, a keen scholarly analysis of a variety of sources will allow us to reconstruct the sonic environment of the court. I have identified three types of sources:1) written texts and archives mentioning sound, such as visitors’ descriptions of both castles, letters, inventories, registers, account records2) visual sources such as engravings, etchings, but also historical maps to localise the sonic activities depicted3) artefacts from both courtsIvory carved horse carriage, skatkammer, Rosenborg[audio wav="http://privacy.hypotheses.org/files/2020/09/497693__leo153__2-horse-carriage.wav"][/audio]SOUND will consider sounds produced by humans (conversations, quarrels, murmurs, singing, crying, yelling, laughing, male and female voices, adults and children, native or foreign languages, but also sounds produced by the body such as steps, rustling clothes, sick bodies suffering, sex agony, and death), sounds produced by animals (horse hooves, dogs, cats, birds and exotic animals), mechanical objects (bells, carriages, kitchen tools, weapons, craftmen’s tools), artistic sounds (music, dance, theatre, fireworks), and natural sounds (water and fountains, wind, fire). The written sources will be analysed lexically with a thesaurus of words referring to sound, noise, music, listening, and hearing. The visual sources will be studied from the perspective of sound and space: what is making noise in a painting and how does it relate to the site where it is made on a map? Artefacts producing sound can be literally heard and even recorded, giving access to a true sonic reconstruction.Weapons, Skatkammer[audio mp3="http://privacy.hypotheses.org/files/2020/09/218522__yap-audio-production__medievalcombatloop.mp3"][/audio]Bringing soundscape studies into research on privacy and the burgeoning field of court studies offers an entirely new perspective. SOUND will use theoretical approaches from sound studies, musicology, and history, connecting them for the very first time. Soundscape studies have proven to be a fruitful approach and have produced substantial scholarship. Sonic materialism proposes a new model to analyze sounds by considering hearing, advocating a new sonic epistemology. It highlights the dynamic materiality of sounds and their relationship with the bodies producing them. The reconstruction of sounds from the past based on written sources has generated a flourishing scholarship in early music and theatre studies since the 1960s along with thriving early music and theatre performances based on the fruits of historical research. It includes the reconstruction of unwritten practices such as improvisation, performance practices, acting, and the restitution of early pronunciations. Such methods can easily be applied to sounds in a broader context.The Porcelain Cabinet, Rosenborg[audio wav="http://privacy.hypotheses.org/files/2020/09/268628__gordonjcowan__cafe-20150326-edit-mp3cut.net_.wav"][/audio]OUTCOME:The most innovative idea of this project is to realize a sonic history of the court, that will be published as a monograph. An other outcome will be the realization of an immersive and spatialized exhibition with soundscapes at Rosenborg Castle in 2023. These exhibitions are a more evocative and exciting means to present everyday life at the court, not only in the eyes of the audience but also in their ears, giving them an enhanced perception of what the past was like and how it sounded. In a society that is ever more disconnected from its past, it is important today more than ever to come up with new ideas for the dissemination of history, an aspect to which this project will contribute. Studying the past allows us to understand its legacies in the present: SOUND will study the Danish court during the reigns of Christian IV, Frederik III, and Christian V (1606–1710, or from Rosenborg’s construction as a country house by Christian IV, through its use as a royal residence until 1710), first as an elective monarchy and from 1660 onwards as an absolute monarchy. As such, it represents an archetypal place of power with refined systems of representation and control, but also a thriving site of social, cultural, and intellectual exchange, with an enduring legacy today. Understanding these dynamics will lead us to understand people and their relation to power and culture, enabling us to question the way contemporary soundscapes and sonic practices contribute to our own relationship to power. Even today, sound remains a tool used to display power, from political rallies and national celebrations to the use of loud music to torture prisoners of war. At a societal level, Rosenborg is a major landmark and museum. Its popularity among visitors attests to its importance today. As such, it represents the perfect medium to communicate history in a vivid way.Sounds profoundly shape our experience of a place, yet we seldom pay attention to them. An interesting consequence of the lockdown of society in spring 2020 was the extreme reduction of noise pollution. Suddenly, everyone was listening and hearing better, being aware of the quality of our soundscapes, once that almost all industrial noises had disappeared. This unprecedented experience gave us a little insight in how the soundscapes of the pre-industrial world sounded like.