The following passage is adapted from an essay discussing the preservation of historical soundscapes.
While contemporary preservationists spend decades restoring the physical facades of Gothic cathedrals or Victorian townhomes, they routinely ignore the invisible architecture of sound. To step into a medieval chapel today is to encounter a sterile quietness that would have been unrecognizable to its original inhabitants. In the Middle Ages, these stone halls did not house a quiet, reverent vacuum; they were chambers of amplification, engineered to blend the reverberations of chanting voices, the rustle of heavy wool vestments, and the low hum of street markets filtering through unglazed windows. Modern restoration techniques, in their single-minded pursuit of visual purity, often install dampening materials that absorb these echoes, effectively silencing the history they claim to protect. In doing so, we do not salvage the past; we merely build its pristine, mute sarcophagus.
Based on the passage, the author's tone when discussing "modern restoration techniques" is best described as which of the following?
- Aappreciative of the precision required to maintain the structural integrity of historical buildings
- Bskeptical of the historical accuracy of visual reconstructions of the past
- critical of the narrow focus that leads to the silencing of historical acoustic propertiesAnswer
- Dindifferent toward the aesthetic differences between medieval and modern architecture