The sounds of everyday life in early modern Crete and Cyprus—from church bells and Ottoman calls to prayer to Jewish liturgical chants and Greek folk songs—have been largely lost to history, and SONICC aims to recover them. This matters because traditional musicology, focused on composers and written scores, has failed to capture the lived sonic experience of these islands, which sat at the crossroads of the Venetian and Ottoman empires. The region’s complex mix of Greek, Ottoman, Jewish, Armenian, Arab, and Italian populations created a rich but poorly understood soundscape. Existing archival methods are ill-suited to studying this, leaving a gap in understanding how sound shaped identity in colonial and shifting hegemonies. If successful, the project could transform how historians study intercultural contact, offering a new, decolonial framework for understanding identity formation through sound. This is primarily fundamental research in musicology and auditory history, with no immediate practical application. However, deeper knowledge of how past societies negotiated difference through sound could inform contemporary debates on multiculturalism, heritage, and the politics of noise in diverse communities.
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Located at the Eastern edge of the Venetian Empire and the Western edge of the Ottoman Empire, early modern Crete and Cyprus have been at the periphery of musicology. As spaces of coloniality and shifting hegemonies, shared by acoustic communities with very different histories, this area has been ill-served by traditional methods. Sources amenable to philological and archival research are scarce, and a paradigm built around composers and institutions has so far failed to capture the lived historical realities of a complex intercultural situation. SONICC investigates long-standing processes of friction and hybridisation based on different sounds, noises, musical practices and languages, that affected local Greek, Ottoman, Jewish, Armenian, Arab and Italian populations. The project will approach this complex topic via two strands of methodological innovation. First, drawing on the emerging fields of Sound Studies and Auditory History to address sound as a distinct historical category with a key role in identity formation, using state-of-the art critical approaches to investigate Mediterranean sonic identities through decolonial and global history perspectives. Second, an intermedial approach investigating literary, visual, material and architectural materials as sources for the history of sounds and musics, as well as archival and notated music sources. Dr Hatzikiriakos has a strong track record in the study of musical identities, and is skilled with primary sources in Italian, Greek and Latin. At Sheffield, he will work with Prof Tim Shephard, a prominent authority on early modern musical identities and visual and material sources in musicology; and Dr Erin Maglaque, a leading expert on Venetian colonies. Secondments at the Orient-Institut Istanbul and the University of Athens will meet training and research needs. The MSCA will establish Dr Hatzikiriakos as an independent voice advancing global and decolonial approaches to early modern musical identities.
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