Sounds of Heritage

Is sound heritage? Sound is inherent to every building, every object. A wind which whistles its way through a church door, the bustle of people on a market square, the echo inside a church or even farm machinery harvesting the year's crops...And yet, we still rarely think about sound as part of heritage. For this episode of Holistic Heritage, hosts John Beauchamp and Dr Katarzyna Jagodzińska are in the Portuguese town of Mafra at the UNESCO site of the Royal Buildings of the Palace, Basilica and Convent, where heritage and museum specialists have gathered to discuss sound in museums and heritage sites.In the episode, we speak to Alcina Cortez, a sonic researcher and founder of the Sound in Museums Conference, as well as Luisa Santos Professor at the Catholic University of Portugal and a curator at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, on the role of sound in heritage.As part of our endeavours of raising awareness of the sonic layer of heritage and making heritage sounds more accessible, the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub for Central and Eastern Europe has set up the Heritage Sound Register. While still in its initial phase, it aims to provide the public with free to use sounds.Among the sounds on the register you can hear a number of sound artefacts which are an inherent part of the cultural heritage of Central and Eastern Europe. In the podcast, you can hear the industrial complex in Dolni Vitkovice in Ostrava, a mechanical loom at Łódź's Central Museum of Textiles, a excavator at the Queen Louise Adit in Zabrze, and the Mocănița logging train in Romania's Maramureș region. You can find more here.