At least since Kantorowicz’s pathbreaking study “The King's Two Bodies”, medieval and early modern funerals for the elites have attracted considerable scholarly attention. Such intensive research notwithstanding, an important aspect of the rituals has been routinely overlooked: the soundscape, that is the human perception of the acoustic environment. In turn, musicology did not ignore funerals altogether, but remained wedded to work-centred analysis—focusing on ‘great works’ by ‘great composers’—thus considering only written art music and marginalizing the agency of performers and listeners. The project "Funeral soundscapes" will fill this scholarly lacuna, focussing on the sound world of high-status funerals in the age of confessionalization (c. 1550–c. 1650). It will challenge traditional musicological approaches by pursuing a complex idea of soundscape, situating music within the interaction between sound and silence. This will be achieved through an innovative methodology that combines historical musicology, death studies, and sensory history, tackling musical sources side by side with a largely untapped corpus of literary and archival materials. By doing so, the project will show how past listeners construed the sound of death rituals for members of the elite, revealing the complex religious, political, and emotional meanings that were attached to funeral soundscapes.