The Soundme Project at the HERA Midterm Conference, March 2018

Members of the Utrecht, Warsaw, Prague, and Heidelberg/Zurich teams attended the HERA Midterm Conference in Vienna to engage in discussion and intellectual exchange with other HERA-funded research projects on our shared research topic “Uses of the Past”. In practical workshops the teams explored strategies to communicate their research output to media and policy makers, to exchange knowledge with non-academic partners, and to deal with leadership challenges.

The Sound Memories teams engaged particularly with the role of the past in the construction of identities (whether that is local, regional, national, religious, social, or something else) and the uses of the past in material culture, discussing these issues with the UPIER, iC-ACCESS, EUROPACH, MODSCAPES and PriArc projects.

Antonio Chemotti presented his research on the Silesian song book by Valentin Triller highlighting the role of music of the past in the construction of a local Lutheran identity. David Eben underlined the authoritative force yielded by past forms of musical notation in late medieval manuscripts as expressions of power and identity through the medium of script.