17-12-2015
The bell from the church of S. Pedro de Coruche is recognised as the oldest bell in Portugal and is one rare surviving example of early bells cast during the 13th century. It was exhumed broken and incomplete from a crypt-ossuary in an archaeological excavation carried out near Lisbon.
A group of five researchers from three institutes - Instituto de Etnomusicologia, Centro de Estudos em Música e Dança (INET-MD), Centro de Investigação em Materiais (CENIMAT/i3N) from Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, and Centro de Ciências e Tecnologias Nucleares (C2TN/IST) from Universidade de Lisboa - combined efforts to bring back to life the sound of this valuable historical artefact.
The results have been recently published in an original article of the Journal of Cultural Heritage (V. Debut, et al., The sound of bronze: Virtual resurrection of a broken medieval bell, Journal of Cultural Heritage (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2015.09.007) where it is exposed how an innovative interdisciplinary methodology, combining experimental and numerical techniques from materials science and music acoustics, can be applied to reproduce the sound that the bell from Coruche might have had in the past.
Sounds of the bell impacted with different clappers and at different heights were virtually reconstructed and examples can be heard at the site of the Museum of Coruche, where the bell is currently exposed (http://museu-coruche.org/sino/).
Mais Informações em:
The sound of bronze: Virtual resurrection of a broken medieval bell
