(ZENIT News / Rome, 12.23.2025).- What did transcendence sound like centuries ago, before microphones, amplification, or modern architectural alterations reshaped sacred spaces? A research team at Stanford University is attempting to answer that question not through theology or archaeology alone, but through sound.
By digitally reconstructing the acoustics of some of the world’s most spiritually charged sites, the project seeks to understand how music, architecture, and human perception converged to generate experiences of awe, reverence, and the sublime in earlier civilizations. Renaissance cathedrals in Italy, Paleolithic caves in France, ancient Egyptian tombs, and Inca ceremonial spaces in the Andes are all part of an ambitious effort to recover what believers and worshippers may once have heard—and felt.
The initiative, titled Sound, Space and the Aesthetics of the Sublime, is funded by the Templeton Foundation and led by Jonathan Berger, a professor of music composition and theory at Stanford and a specialist in music cognition at the university’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Berger and his interdisciplinary team are less interested in nostalgia than in mechanisms: how sound behaves in sacred architecture, how that behavior interacts with visual perception, and why certain environments consistently elicit spiritual or transcendent responses across cultures and eras.
At the heart of the project lies a provocative hypothesis. Many sacred sites, the researchers argue, produce acoustic effects that disrupt ordinary sensory expectations. Echoes blur spatial boundaries, sound sources become difficult to locate, distances seem to stretch or collapse. What the eyes perceive as finite and material, the ears experience as expansive and elusive. This sensory dissonance, they suggest, may be one of the hidden engines behind religious awe.
Such environments can create what Berger describes as impressions of immensity and indeterminacy. Listeners may struggle to judge where a sound originates, how many voices or instruments are involved, or how far away a source might be. The resulting uncertainty, rather than causing discomfort, often opens the door to a sense of the ethereal—an impression that one is standing before something larger than oneself.
To test these ideas, the team is building a growing library of virtual acoustic spaces. These digitally modeled environments allow participants to hear music or sound as it would have resonated centuries or even millennia ago, while researchers measure emotional, cognitive, and perceptual responses. Whenever possible, the work is complemented by experiments in physical locations, grounding the virtual reconstructions in real-world experience.
One of the most striking examples comes from Florence. The team has “auralized” Nuper rosarum flores, the motet composed by Guillaume Dufay for the consecration of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in 1436. By placing the music within a precise virtual model of the Duomo, researchers can approximate how the motet might have sounded beneath Brunelleschi’s newly completed dome—an architectural and symbolic marvel of its time. Few churches of this scale have survived without significant acoustic alterations, making such reconstructions particularly valuable.
The project’s reach extends far beyond Christian Europe. A virtual model of the Chauvet Cave in southern France, home to some of the world’s oldest known cave paintings, has been used to recreate Paleolithic soundscapes with instruments modeled on prehistoric percussion tools. The results suggest that even tens of thousands of years ago, sound may have played a deliberate role in ritual or symbolic activity, interacting with enclosed spaces to heighten sensory impact.
Interest from archaeologists has steadily expanded the project’s geographical and cultural scope. Ongoing collaborations now include studies in Egypt and Peru, while one member of the team is focusing on Islamic archaeology and acoustic traditions in Turkey. In each case, sound becomes a lens through which ancient religious life can be reexamined, complementing material remains and visual analysis.
Artists, too, are part of the experiment. Musicians and performers are invited into these virtual spaces to observe how they instinctively adapt their performance to unfamiliar acoustic conditions. Their choices—tempo, articulation, dynamics—offer further clues about how sacred soundscapes may have shaped liturgical and ritual practices over time.
The implications of the research extend well beyond historical curiosity. By isolating acoustic features that reliably evoke transcendence, the team hopes to shed light on broader questions about human cognition, spirituality, and aesthetics. Why does certain music, heard in certain spaces, move people toward silence, contemplation, or reverence? And are these responses culturally learned, biologically rooted, or somewhere in between?
The project will culminate next year with a final gathering of the full research group at Stanford, where findings from across disciplines will be brought into dialogue. While the sounds of the past can never be fully recovered, this work suggests that something essential—an echo of humanity’s long search for meaning—can still be heard.
In listening carefully to ancient spaces, the researchers are not only reconstructing history. They are reminding a modern, often noise-saturated world that silence, resonance, and mystery once worked together to open the human spirit toward the infinite.
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