Page - 187 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

In the Orality/Aurality of the Book | 187www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 173–190 relationship between architectural design and sacred music in Renaissance Venice is combined with scientific explorations and choral experiments in the spaces themselves. In addition, the work of art historian Bissera Pentcheva and the musicologist Alexander Lingas explores the way Byzantine chanting would have been heard through computationally simulated spatio-temporal environments.19 Coming from a purely scientific or mathematical understand- ing of music, these studies are limited to the qualities of architecture that are shared with this approach to music, a more algorithmic and technical approach to acoustics, that while valuable does not fully describe the materi- ality of the atmosphere and its bodily poetics. Here, a bottom-up methodology is adopted20 to capture glimpses of the soundscape related to the book’s use as a performative object. Starting from the people and the processes followed to fulfil the intentions of the clergy-in- charge, the spaces are read through the creation, maintenance and evolution of the soundscape itself, a soundscape that reflects the identity of a transna- tional community whose members have settled in a new land.21 It is really difficult to describe in text something intended to be lived (either heard or performed), something so integral to the choreography of the services. But isn’t that always the case when scholarship seeks to translate ambient atmos- phere into hermeneutic narratives? Even online streaming provides a differ- ent soundscape from the actual one, translated from the phenomenal to the virtual.22 Writing about the soundscape of this community allows us to adopt a distance from it and to think about the effort that is invested to transform the text – the language that is performed in a typical service – into an ambient mosaic through translation, transliteration and transcription. The book itself is a space of interaction. Inked symbols, gaps and lines are all interrelated on the white pages. As an instrument of attunement, the book, or the folder in our case, enables the performance and perception of an inclusive soundscape. Human praxis is at the core of phenomenal study of sacred space filled with voices through time. Place-making is an “embodied practice” and “the out- 19 Pentcheva 2017a, 2017b. 20 For additional use of bottom-up methodology for religious musical environments see Lind 2012. 21 This methodology contrasts with the top-down application of a pre-formed theoretical framework or methodological model to a specific case study. 22 A characteristic Divine Liturgy according to the order of the folders can be accessed in the services live-streamed during the COVID-19 lockdown: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=H_1GIDh0dg0 [accessed 1 August 2020].