It is in the nature of an academic discipline to focus on one kind of evidence and a single methodology for studying it. This tendency is defensible insofar as it hones the skills of analysis and directs the training students within the literatures and interpretive techniques of a discipline. But such singularity of thinking comes at the price of inclining practitioners to ignore new evidence and alternative interpretive treatments of it. Interdisciplinary study solves that problem by teaching scholars to interrogate the same evidence differently or by making available new forms of evidence. Traditional disciplines like architectural history and musicology, long practiced and deeply rooted in the study of their respective objects, are very good at treating the formal properties of buildings and musical sound, but remarkably myopic when it comes to expanding their registers of evidence and interpretation. They are very good at defining and scrutinizing the typology of buildings, in the first instance, and the study of musical compositions and their rendition in performance, in the second. Both disciplines practice a methodological formalism with extreme subtlety, and the best practitioners are virtuosos at its application.

But practitioners of these two disciplinary practices are commonly given to narrow specialization and often stolidly uninterested in making the study of buildings or music relevant to the study of the sort of thing that scholars of religion find important such as the ritual uses of spaces and the social life of sound. Formalism argues that meaning inheres in the form or structure of an artifact. Define what that meaning is, and the work of the analyst is essentially complete. Circulation, reception, use, even the intention of the maker are at best secondary. Religious Studies tends to be very interdisciplinary, sometimes so much so that it is difficult to speak meaningfully about a center, or even several centers. But where the study of religion works very well, at least to my mind, is where two or three disciplines engage in serious conversation and collaboration to study religion as a lived practice. This is happening in a great deal of work today, some of it ethnographic, some sociological, some archival-historical in nature. A very engaging example of an interdisciplinary study of the space and sound of religion is the volume under review, a careful, resourceful examination of the relationship between church design, acoustics, and musical composition in Renaissance Venice. The authors are architectural historians at work in a traditionally well-defined domain: sixteenth-century Italian ecclesiastical architecture. Yet they avail themselves of diverse forms of evidence and work compellingly at the cusp of two domains—space and sound.

Authors Howard and Moretti examine twelve particular churches that comprise five different categories of religious buildings: a private chapel, monastic churches, mendicant friaries, parish churches, and churches in hospitals—all in use during the sixteenth-century in Venice, though some had been built much earlier. Their primary questions involve important conventional queries like the acoustic implications of architectural features such as domes, vaults, and apses, and the effect of materials on musical sound. But they are also interested in a much less traditional question: “how do listeners in various locations perceive the same performance?” (10). But how can such information be generated when historical data regarding reception are lacking? Howard and Moretti conducted a critical analysis of the response of a modern audience—academic listeners whom they assembled as part of conferences devoted to the study of space and sound. The audience members—architectural historians, musicologists, and acousticians, but also singers—experienced a variety of choral performances in plainchant, polyphony, and the spoken voice, as well as instrumental performance of organs. All music consisted of period pieces selected by the authors in consultation with musicologists who are experts in the field. Questionnaires developed by professional acousticians were distributed among the audience to assess acoustic qualities in the twelve spaces studied and were designed to help the researchers register the perception of sonic characteristics of the space and sound (volume, clarity, reverberance, envelopment, intimacy, warmth, brilliance, echo, timbre, and background noise). In the case of one of their spaces, which was demolished in the nineteenth century, the authors reconstructed the space using computer-aided design (CAD). Drawing on plans and section drawings of the structure, and eighteenth-century engravings of the interior, they were able to simulate the building's sonic properties. Howard and Moretti also conducted scientific measurements of the acoustic parameters of each space such as sound pressure levels, early decay time, a variety of reverberation rates, and other features, each of which could be compared productively to the human reception of sound qualities gathered in the questionnaires. Finally, the authors studied archival documents and other historical sources to inform their study of the uses of the space in liturgical performance and other ritual settings. An extensive apparatus of appendices compiles their methods and resulting data.

The book is a beautifully produced volume, well illustrated with 135 black-and-white illustrations and color plates. The text is clearly written prose with a great deal of careful historical discussion of architects, musicians, composers, ritual occasions, contemporary acoustical theory, architectural designs, and historical contexts. Rather than restrict themselves to one form of evidence or one disciplinary protocol, Howard and Moretti have demonstrated how a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach can respond far more robustly to the performance of religion as an intersensory event, and how the study of the interaction of two media—sound and space—captures very productively how religion happens in the ritual setting of time and place. This study is a solidly conceived and executed piece of research that may serve as a model for scholars interested not only in sound and space but also in such combinations as vision and movement, sound and sight, smell and space, or taste and sight.