This video is sponsored by Nebula!
hey, welcome to 12tone! this month, I'm trying an experiment and featuring some guest videos
from other great youtube channels, in order to get more different perspectives on music.
this week's video is from Andrew over at the channel Religion For Breakfast.
Andrew's a religious studies expert, and he's looking at the role of music in a world very
different from the one we know today.
take it away, Andrew!
What you’re listening to is a modern rendition of a very ancient Christian chant.
It was sung as part the evening liturgy in the Byzantine Empire up until the 12th century.
But what you’re looking at are the ruins of an early Byzantine church in the ancient
town of Shivta, south of Jerusalem.
As someone who studies religious experience in the ancient Mediterranean world, I can’t
help but wonder…what was it like to live in this ancient town? to live next to this
ancient Christian church at a time when Christianity was still a brand new religion, a time when
Christian sacred music was a brand new industry.
Archaeologists have tried to figure this out too.
In June 2014, a team of archaeologists, sound engineers, and musicologists brought these
ancient chants back to life.
They recreated the music from original Byzantine copies of chant notation, they rehearsed the
music with professional chanters, and then performed the music in ancient Christian churches,
all of this to try to understand the experience of the ancient worshiper as they were surrounded
by the sound of sacred music.
This is experimental archaeology at its finest, but despite trying so hard to try to recreate
the ancient experience of this ancient music, there’s a big difference between the 5th
century and the 21st century that will always make experiments like this a little incomplete.
[cut to loud traffic; jack hammers; sirens]
Noise pollution.
Average city traffic measures at 80 decibels, the same as an alarm clock going off 2 feet
away from you.
A lawn mower is 90 decibels, and 120 for a jack hammer.
Compare this to Shivta 1500 years ago.
The soundscape of an ancient town was completely different:
Soundscape refers to the totality of sounds in a landscape, and the soundscape of where
you live subtly and subconsciously shapes how we experience daily life.
Much of the soundscape that we experience in the modern city is muddled together, but
Loud sounds were actually very rare before the invention of gunpowder, electricity, and
the internal combustion engine.
The loudest noises you could have possibly experienced might have been thunder or, if
you were super unlucky, a meteor strike or a volcanic eruption.
but an ordinary person living an ordinary day in an ancient city would have rarely experienced
something louder than a dog barking.
In fact, according to the historian Bruce Smith who has studied pre-industrial urban
soundscapes “In the absence of ambient sounds of more than 70 dB...the sound of outdoor
conversations would become a major factor in the sonic environment.”
He goes on to say that the highly reflective surfaces of buildings would have amplified
this.
If you wanted hold a private conversation in public, you would've needed to whisper
in order to ensure that no one wo overhear you.
Cities were that quite.
So, in light of this research, what are the implications for ancient music?
In a tiny ancient city in the eastern Mediterranean, with only a few hundred people, and very little
ambient sound, you probably would have heard religious music everywhere when it was sung.
The best way to try to imagine this is to walk the streets of an ancient town like Shivta.
The town only covers 1 square kilometer.
It’s pretty tiny.
But packed into that dense community were 3 churches, you couldn’t walk for more than
a few dozen meters without hitting another church.
In fact, some of the early Christian towns I’ve studied had upwards to 8 churches packed
into 1 square Kilometer.
Based on what we know about ancient soundscapes, we can infer that this town would have been
blanketed with sacred music wafting through the air as you go about your day.
Religious music would have formed what scholars call a “keynote sound.”
A constant background sound around which other sounds are interpreted.
So why does this matter?
This sort of research forces us to think historically about human experience.
Our experience of music is shaped by our historical moment.
The accessibility of music on platforms like Spotify.
Even what music sounded like with the invention of new musical instruments in only the past
500 or 50 years.
Our experience of music is a modern phenomenon.
For me, this makes the work of the historian equal parts exciting and frustrating.
It’s exciting to try to recreate what ancient music might have sounded like, but so much
of that experience has been lost to time.
By 2050, 2/3rds of humanity will live in the screeching soundscapes of modern cities.
Many of us will live and die without experiencing what millions of humans experienced on a daily
basis in the pre-industrial age, a time when music could have been heard 100s of meters
away as you went about your daily life.
(sounds of walking.)
...wow. thanks, Andrew! if you'd like to see more videos on the study of religion, I'd
recommend his video on the Druids, or the one about the rise of exorcisms in the United
States.
I've linked to both in the description.
but before you go, I want to tell you about an exciting project and this video's sponsor,
Nebula.
Nebula's a new video platform developed by some of youtube's top educational creators
including CGP Grey, Lindsay Ellis, Kurzgesagt, and, well, me.
I helped put it together, and my stuff's on there too.
it's totally creator-run, and its main purpose is to give us a place to experiment without
being bound by youtube's restrictive algorithm.
there's already some awesome new originals over there, including one by my friend Noah
from Polyphonic, who made a three-part series about the stories behind Led Zeppelin's greatest
epics: Stairway To Heaven, Kashmir, and Achilles' Last Stand. it's a really cool dive into one
of rock's most revered bands. if you want to check it out, you can click the link in
the description for a free 7-day trial, and if you like what you see, membership is just
$5 a month after that.
plus, as a bonus, since these guest videos are already edited, I'm gonna be uploading
the rest of them a couple days early over on Nebula so if you sign up you can beat the
rush on those too.
and hey, thanks for watching, thanks to our Patreon patrons for making these videos possible,
and extra-special thanks to this video's featured patron, Susan Jones! if you want to help out,
and get some sweet perks like sneak peeks of upcoming episodes, there's a link to our
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