Author (s)
López Samantha 1 2, Lokki Tapio 3, Díaz-Andreu Margarita 4 5 6, Carles Escera 1 2 5 7
Affiliation
1 Brainlab – Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
2 Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
3 Acoustics Lab, Aalto University, Finland
4 Departament d’Història i Arqueologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
5 Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain
6 Institut d’Arqueologia de la Universitat de Barcelona (IAUB), Barcelona, Spain
7 Institut de Recerca Sant Joan de Déu (IRSJD), Esplugues de Llobregat, Spai
Publication date
2025
Abstract
Acoustics play a crucial role in shaping our perception of sound and its emotional impact. The rock art site of Cuevas de la Araña in Bicorp, Spain, is an archaeological site where pre-historic communities gathered for social and ritual activities. Cuevas de la Araña exhibits acoustical characteristics that could have enhanced the sensory and emotional impact during ceremonies performed with music. In the present study, a listening test was conducted to assess how the acoustics of Cuevas de la Araña and other rock art sites influence modern-day listeners’ perception of sound. Listeners were asked to describe, using their own vocabulary, a series of auralizations created with the impulse responses collected in Cuevas de la Araña and other neighboring sites with and without rock art. The words written by participants underwent categorization through a hierarchical clustering approach. Significant results emerged indicating that listeners perceived auralizations from rock art sites as larger, wider, less direct, farther and more reverberant than the auralizations from sites lacking rock art. Notably, the most prominent disparities were observed in the categories of size, distance, and reverberation when contrasting the auralizations from Cuevas de la Araña with those of non-painted sites. These findings align with the outcomes documented in prior literature that investigated the acoustic characteristics of the sites and offer valuable insights into the auditory experiences at rock art sites, shedding light on their unique acoustic properties.
Full paper
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.14.629613v1.full.pdf
Keywords
impuls responces, archeoacustics