Acoustics and Music of British Prehistory Research Network

Arts and Music Research Questions for the Acoustics and Music of British Prehistory Research Group 

1. How does auditory environmental context influence behaviour?

2. How does sound operate as a determinant experiential feature of everyday environments for humans acting and interacting in and with those environments?

3. In the face of the modern aural environment and its conditioning and shaping of our aural perceptions, to what degree can we reconstruct or understand the aural past?

4. How can we reconstruct the music and sound of Prehistoric Britain?

5. How might a multisensory approach to monuments be applied to interpreting how people in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age experience and understood their world, and how can we explore ways of capturing and conveying these experiences in the present day?

6. How prominent should the use of sound tools be in investigations of soundscapes? What is the role of the socio-cultural?

7. How do you define the appropriate sound ‘performance’ for a given space given the dearth of evidence for the use of sound in ritual and art? Does later evidence provide assistance?

8. How do the reverberation times and resonance characteristics of prehistoric enclosed spaces relate to or favour particular frequencies of iterative musical pulse?

9. Assuming that some archaeological spaces suggest an interaction between acoustics and the human voice such as resonant frequencies, what do we actually know about how the voice was used? For example was throat singing known in Prehistoric Britain?