A Methodology for the Historically Informed Soundscape

Although the concept of Historically Informed Performance (HIP) has been initially based on the exact representations of the early music, over the time, the unattainable nature of “authentic performances” has prevailed and many researchers have accepted it as a certain endeavor to reach historic conditions of the early performances as possible. This approach is very different from historical soundscape studies, where the tendencies of staying in monograph is still preponderating. Today, the new technologies and boomed digital humanities methods allow to update this approach. This study focuses on the impacts of these new methods into historical soundscape studies by grounding on HIP concept. The application of HIP into soundscape has been done for the first time by Linda Pearse and colleagues which created the concept of Historically Informed Soundscape (HIS) composition and suggesting to concentrate what we can excavate from the history with accepting our current possibilities to obtain history-based compositions in an artistic context. On the contrary, we discuss the HIS as a complete research method in historical soundscape investigation by introducing the sound designer instead of performer in HIP. What is the importance of reproduction in sensory studies and which digital techniques we can utilize to work with historical soundscape, from historical records to sound, were also mentioned in the study.