Aural Histories: Coventry 1451-1642

September 2026 - September 2027 | Available during opening hours Show all dates and times

Explore how music might have sounded in the 15th-17th century.

Drop in | Included with admission

Located in the History Gallery

Have you ever wondered how music might have sounded inside the Old Cathedral in the fifteenth century? How about Holy Trinity Church in the sixteenth century, or St Mary’s Guildhall in the seventeenth?

A research project called Aural Histories: Coventry 1451-1642 recently spent three years asking just these questions, using materials from Coventry Archives and the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery to help find answers.

The Inspiration
A rare and important musical fragment preserved in the Coventry Leet Book provided information on the type of music that might have been heard during the visit of King Henry VI to Coventry in 1451. Nineteenth-century watercolours and sketches gave clues about how the inside of St Mary’s Guildhall might have looked at different points during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a copy of antiquarian Thomas Sharp’s dissertation about Coventry’s medieval pageants provides the earliest known source of the famous Coventry Carol.   

Developing an App  
Using this information, plus Lidar scans of the buildings as they exist today, the   
research team built 3D models of all three buildings and used these models to   
simulate how music might have sounded in each space. To communicate the   
findings of this research, the team built an app containing computer   
simulations of each reconstructed space, which you can experience on the   
tablets provided.