The Past Has Ears at Notre-Dame: Acoustic digital twins for research and narration

Abstract

The recent fire at the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris has motivated a series of studies attempting to understand better the acoustics of Notre-Dame, its evolution over the centuries, and its influence on music, extending to projections in aid of its restoration. To accomplish these, a digital twin of the cathedral, reflecting the acoustic conditions, was created and subsequently varied to reconstruct the buildings' historical and possible future states. While fundamentally employed for various research studies, the project's cultural importance obliged consideration of means to share and disseminate its efforts to the general public. Highlighting this aspect, the methodology and details of two completed public productions realised in this work are presented here, exposing how the research tools developed and the scientific results previously obtained were transformed into mediatisation productions through different methods of narration.