SPECIAL SESSION 9: “Composing the Past – Immersive Environments in Humanities Research” – Jonathan Berger & Cobi van Tonder

What if we could not only see but also hear and compose within the lost soundscapes of history? Advances in immersive audio and visual technologies are redefining how we reconstruct, analyze, and even compose within historical spaces. This session explores how spatialized sound, virtual acoustics, and interactive performance environments breathe new life into cultural heritage sites, shaping new creative and research paradigms in musicology, sound studies, anthropology, and beyond.

From reconstructing ancient ritual performances to composing new works within historically resonant spaces, this panel will investigate how immersive environments enable novel interactions between architecture, acoustics, and musical creativity. How do composers engage with reconstructed soundscapes? How can digital tools allow us to reimagine lost musical traditions? What role does spatial audio play in contemporary composition inspired by historical sites?

We invite innovative, practice-based projects—especially those incorporating composition, interactive demos, and performance-based research—to explore how immersive technologies can be a bridge between the past and future of music and sonic expression.

We invite a wide scope of papers about practice based projects – with matching demos where possible.

Keywords:

Data acquisition, analysis, modeling, architectural acoustics, cultural histories, resonant properties, performance spaces, performance practice, spatial audio, virtual reality, cultural studies, musicology, history of art and architecture, cognitive science, audio engineering, archaeology, anthropology, musicology, music, rituals, sound and space, cognition, perception, psychology, composition, sound art, art practice, immersive arts.

Session co-chairs: Jonathan Berger, Stanford University and Cobi van Tonder, University of Bologna

Bios: Jonathan Berger is the Denning Family Provostial Professor in Music at Stanford University. Berger is a composer of a wide range of genres including opera, orchestral, chamber, end electroacoustic music. He is also an active researcher, with expertise in computational music theory, music perception and cognition, psychoacoustics, and sonification. He has published over 70 academic articles in a wide variety of fields relating to music, science, and technology, including relevant work in digital audio processing in Neuron, Frontiers in Psychology, andthe Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. Among his awards and commissions are the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and commissions from Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, the 92^nd Street Y, The Spoleto Festival, the Kronos Quartet, and others. Berger is the Principal Investigator of a major grant from the Templeton Religion Trust’s Art Seeking Understanding initiative, to study the interplay of architectural acoustics and musical and ritual sound.

Cobi van Tonder is a practice-led researcher and interdisciplinary artist. She composes and performs microtonal drone music, synthesized music, and sound pieces based on field recordings, infrasound, and virtual acoustics. Her current project, ACOUSTIC ATLAS – Cultivating the Capacity to Listen, developed during a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, enables remote listening in the browser through virtual acoustic technology. Cobi completed a Ph.D. in Music Composition at Trinity College, Dublin, an MFA Art Practice degree at Stanford, USA; and a BHons in Music in History and Society (Musicology) at WITS, Johannesburg, South Africa. Cobi is currently a research fellow at the Department of Architecture, Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna.