Giving a voice to the silenced walls of Notre-Dame

Ever imagined the sounds that echoched inside and outside Paris' Notre-Dame cathedral hundreds of years ago? In the fire, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame not only lost its roof and walls, but also acoustics, its characteristic reverberation that made everyone whisper. There is a chance to get that back.

Mylène Pardoën, a soundscape archaeologist, is recreating the sonic landscape of the glorious Notre-Dame and retrieving a piece of its past. She is pursuing this by scouting sites around the country that have an acoustic environment which will help reproduce these sounds. 

A sound archeologist does not invent sounds like a sound designer, they recover sounds from the past that are found in the present. Currently a lot of painstaking research is happening to bring back Notre-Dame’s lost voice. This is the biggest project that Pardoën has ever worked on.

Recreating every sound heard since the 13th century till the 2019 fire seems incredibly difficult. The more we know about our history, the richer the museum collections are. Pardoën heavily relies on archives like paintings, sculptures, literature and administrative documents for research. 

Working with a team of acoustic and sound engineers, the architects are also choosing materials that would be best suited to bring about the absolute same sound. Even tiny details such as laying a carpet or changing wood to metal can dramatically change the soundscape. 

Pardoën is currently studying Guédelon, the world's most unique castle which is being rebuilt for 24 years. Why is it taking so long? Because medieval enthusiasts only use tools and methods appropriate to that era. 

By using these sounds of medieval construction as a reference the ambience of the cathedral can be set. These recordings, when processed in a computer simulation, will predict how materials and structural choices during the reconstruction might alter Notre-Dame's future acoustics.