Spaces for sound

Through the history of architecture it is interesting to notice how humans have always modified space to host particular sonorities; for example small offices wrapped in double panels absorb sounds, creating perfect spaces for private conversations, and big temples result in perfect reverberating space for elevated chants and prayers. The constant association between type of spaces and kinds of sounds contributes to build-up our cultural responses to places.

In the background chapter of my thesis, I comment some contemporary examples of Arquitecture for sound, such as Oscar Niemayer's Public Square in Brasilia, which was acoustically designed to amplify the sounds of people’s footsteps, creating percussive patterns by the reverberation of its sounds, as in a large-scale sound instrument. The unexpected feedback, changes peoples perception of the space also modifying their behavior in the public space.

The Austrian artist Bernhard Leitner who was formally trained as an architect, choose a public park by a river, which had a pergola under which the water flows. He did a simple intervention by hanging up a curved metal sheet, which reflects the natural sound of water to the inhabitant’s ears. Here also the experience of sound is discovered by the mere act of inhabiting the “temple”.

Among Leitner’s work we also can find hybrid sound constructions that combines sources and amplification techniques, such as spaces that amplify or redirects natural sounds and electronically amplified sounds within the same space, like in Le Cylindre Sonore, which is a cylindrical structure built in Parc de la Villette, a public park in Paris in 1987. A ten meters diameter and five meters tall concrete double ring has 24 loudspeakers installed between the walls; microphones in the surrounding bamboo forest are amplified to the interior of the ring, and also the wind flowing between the walls.

The electronic augmentation of the natural sounds creates a paradoxical perception, an indistinguishable blending of actual and virtual sound spaces, which give the space a particular almost magical property, an ear building.

Sound as Space

The work of Bernhard Leitner provides a good example of the design of spaces based on the vocabulary of sound. The perception of these spaces unfolds in time with the movement of lines or points of sound, which perceptually modify our experience of space, making the whole body a permeable acoustic depository, a big ear for three-dimensional space.

During the seventies, Bernhard Leitner built and experimented with a series of sound-space installations. Each of them stipulated a specific sound movement to define experiences of space. His well-documented experiments provide objective descriptions of the phenomena delineated in words, pictures and maps. These experiments were centered in the perception of space delimited by sound, describing how the sound movements provoke particular perceptions in the body.

My research paper for the Fall 2002 term, documents and discuss these experiments. The paper can be read here.

The reproduction of sound by electromagnetical means allow us to recreate a given moment in time and space in another time and another space, which suggests the possibility of remote presence. Recording or transmitting live sounds from one environment to another, translates a spatial situation, carrying the representation of one space to another. In this sense, artificially recreating a space can be seen as the creation of a virtual space.

One key aspect about Lucier’s piece is the fact that the room in which he is “… is different from the one you are” as he reads. I think the translocation of spaces is possible not only because of the technologies of reproduction, but because our experiences of space can be recalled by our imagination.

As different musical instruments produce different sounds, spaces have also their own sounds, based on its physical characteristics. An elegant example of this can be found in the work of the American Sound Artist Alvin Lucier. In his piece “I am Sitting in a Room” (1970), Lucier reads aloud the following text, recording his voice in a tape recorder:

“I am sitting in a Room different to the one you are in now.
I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed.
What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech.
I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.”

The recording is played back into the room through a loudspeaker, while simultaneously re-recorded using a microphone. The new recording is played back and re-recorded in a successive series of generations. In each new recording the natural resonance of the room is captured and reinserted, amplifying it until we can no longer distinguish the original text, only remaining the pure resonance of the room.
By listening the recording of this piece, one can “see” the space, not in form but as function. “I am sitting in a room” uses space as a sonic instrument that speaks about itself as space.

Aural reproduction suffers of transformations that would make sounds mere representations of other ones. As an example, a photographic image can be easily understood as a representation, because the changes in scale, perspective, lighting, depth, etc. In an approximation to achieve realism we can find the example of the trompe l'oeil in painting, which creates an illusion of reality by coupling dimension and spatiality. A particular work of the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff, depicts this conception with sound; “Forty Part Motet” is a sound installation that replaces the voices of forty choir voices by forty loudspeakers. This work uses a piece of secular music created in the Sixteenth century by the English composer Thomas Tallis. Visitors can perceive the choral music as a whole while standing in the middle of the space; as they approach to individual speakers they can distinguish individual voices, being able to walk through and climb between the different harmonies and layers of sound. This piece translates the physical inaccessible inner space of choral music to an accessible other space.

Sonic Representation and the Semantics of Sound

The translocation of sounds can also contradict or neglect the space which contains it, as in the work of Bill Fontana, who transmits sounds from one location to another creating a re-presentation of a distant space, which in the change of context suffers of an intriguing permutation and evocation of other physical space, as we can find in "Sound Island" a sound intervention made by Fontana at Arc de Triomphe, Paris in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the D-day. In this work loudspeakers were placed in the four facades of the monument, which transmitted live sounds from the Normandy Coast, transforming the visual and aural experience of the constant traffic around the Arc. The harmonic complexity of the natural sounds of the ocean and crushing waves has the psycho-acoustic ability to mask other sounds, directing our attention to them over the overwhelming noise of traffic.
It is interesting to notice how an intervention like this, with no visual or physical alteration, has the power of completely transform the notion of a space.
The dissimilitude or accordance between sound and vision has been profusely experimented in film, where sound gives us additional information about the situation we are looking at. I remember a TV commercial of the German airline Lufthansa, which shows footage from Manhattan shoot from a taxi in motion, the soundtrack is a frantic Jazz, we can see traffic, faces, beggars, street signs in an overwhelming and suffocating view. The commercial starts again, showing the exact same footage, but this time with placid classical music piece. The effect is completely opposite, what was overwhelming before, now seems quiet and friendly as the music. The commercial ends saying: “You see the world the way you fly”. I would say: way you hear it.