Yosa Buson - poet

                 The sound of a bell

struck off center

               vanishes in haze.

"The Sound of Architecture" at Yale School of Architecture

I'm looking forward to attending this symposium at Yale University School of Architecture in a few weeks! Stay tuned for my observations/comments/responses...
 

SYMPOSIUM: “THE SOUND OF ARCHITECTURE”

Thursday–Saturday, October 4–6, 2012

Yale School of Architecture

Architecture is not tone deaf: It can create silent places and eddies of noise, deeply affecting our experience and facilitating or frustrating communication. Buildings have long been thought of in visual and practical terms, leaving their aural dimension largely unconsidered. Today, the ways we listen in built spaces have been transformed by developments in media, music, and art. New design tools are helping architects shape the soundscapes of their buildings, while new audio technologies afford access to previously undetected sonic environments.

This symposium, convened by Kurt W. Forster and Joseph Clarke, will draw on a variety of disciplinary expertise in its quest for an understanding of architecture as an auditory environment. Leading scholars from fields as diverse as archeology, media studies, musicology, philosophy, and the history of technology will converge at the Yale School of Architecture to discuss critical questions alongside major architects, acoustical engineers, composers, and artists. The Sound of Architecture aims to stake out a new set of questions for ongoing scholarly inquiry and to reaffirm architecture as a place of convergence among old and emerging disciplines.

website: http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/events/symposia 
Free registration: http://www.architecture.yale.edu/dmonline/database/symposium/_symposium_registration_add.php.

Thursday, Oct 4

6:30 pm Welcome
    Yale School of Architecture Dean Robert A. M. Stern
Overture
    Kurt W. Forster (School of Architecture, Yale University)
Lecture: “Ways of Seeing Sound: The Integral House”
    Brigitte Shim (Shim-Sutcliffe, Toronto)

8:30 pm Reception
 
Friday, Oct 5

9:00 am Session 1: Listening to Architecture
The audibility of space is introduced and key questions are raised about its phenomenological manifestations, opening up the intertwined histories of architecture and listening.  Moderator: Mark Jarzombek (Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

“Spatial Design Changes the Eventscape”
    Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter (Blesser Associates, Belmont, Massachusetts)
“Sounding Out”
    Peter Szendy (Département de Philosophie, Université Paris Ouest)
“Acoustics, Architecture, and Music: Understanding the Past and Present, Shaping the Future”
    Raj Patel and Alban Bassuet (Arup Acoustics, New York)
“Acousmatic Phantasmagoria”
    Brian Kane (Department of Music, Yale University)

11:00 am Break
11:15 am Session 2: Sound on Stage
Architecture’s channeling of social forces through aural and visual experience is often founded on paradigms of musical and dramatic performance.  Moderator: Ariane Lourie Harrison (School of Architecture, Yale University)

“Simultaneity and Succession: The Stuff of Dreams on Stage”
    Beat Wyss (Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, Germany)
“Gottfried Semper, Richard Wagner, and the Changing Acoustic Conditions for Music Theater in the Nineteenth Century”
    Dorothea Baumann (Musikwissenschaftliches Institut, Universität Zurich)
“The Ear, the Eye and the Space”
    Craig Hodgetts (Hodgetts Plus Fung Design and Architecture, Culver City, California)

1:00 pm Lunch Break

2:00 pm Session 3: Architecture Mediating Sound
When architecture assumes a form of media technology, the functions of aural communication and isolation are registered in a culture of sonic controls.  Moderator: Mario Carpo (School of Architecture, Yale University)

“Constructing Silences in the Ancient World: Identifying Acoustical Seclusion and Detachment in the Archaeological Record”
    Graeme Lawson (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge)
“Sound Networks and the Public Sphere”
    Carlotta Darò (Ecole nationale superieure d'architecture Paris Malaquais)
“Making Sense: New Media and Social Space”
    Joel Sanders (Joel Sanders Architect, New York)
“The Mormon Tabernacle as Theologically Embedded Soundspace”
    John Durham Peters (Department of Communication Studies, University of Iowa)

4:00 pm Break

4:15 pm Session 4: Representing Acoustic Environments
While sound is often a defining characteristic of space, its representation notoriously defies the limits of traditional architectural discourse. Is there a notion of ambient sound and what does it represent?  Moderator: Jack Vees (School of Music, Yale University)

Projection: “Alcatraz”
    Ingram Marshall (School of Music, Yale University)
“Sampling Space: A Simple Theory of Convolution Reverb”
    Jonathan Sterne (Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University)
“Constructing an Acoustic History of Vancouver on Film”
    Randolph Jordan (Department of Cinema Studies, Simon Fraser University)

6:15 pm Break

6:30 pm Lecture: “B+/A-”
Elizabeth Diller (Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York)

7:45 pm Reception

Saturday, Oct 6
9:00 am Session 5: Civic Noise
The economist Jacques Attali wrote that “any organization of sounds is [...] a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community.” What powers do sounds project and how do they create a definable auratic sphere? How does sound draw together a collective of listeners in space and articulate social fault lines in the city?  Moderator: William Rankin (Department of History, Yale University)

“On the Aural Creation of Urban Communities in Early Modern Italy”
    Niall Atkinson (Department of Art History, University of Chicago)
“The Architecture of Victorian Oratorio”
    Timothy Barringer (Department of the History of Art, Yale University)
“Noise and Public Privacy in the Stethoscopic Era”
    John Picker (Literature Section, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
“Listening to Carchitecture”
    J. D. Connor (Department of the History of Art, Yale University)

11:00 am Roundtable Discussion: Designing Architectural Soundscapes
Moderator: Michelle Addington (School of Architecture, Yale University)

Alban Bassuet (Arup Acoustics, New York)
Craig Hodgetts (Hodgetts Plus Fung Design and Architecture, Culver City)
Karen van Lengen (School of Architecture, University of Virginia)
Raj Patel (Arup Acoustics, New York)
Joel Sanders (Joel Sanders Architect, New York)

12:30 pm Lunch Break

1:30 pm Session 6: Acoustic Space
How do acoustic phenomena “resonate” through the character of the spatial environment? This session considers how sound affects the social and aesthetic qualities of space itself.  Moderator: Kurt W. Forster (School of Architecture, Yale University)

“Infinite and Intimate Space”
    Sabine von Fischer (Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zürich)
“Acoustic Shadows: Macbeth and the Civil War, Washington, D.C., October 17, 1863”
    Alexander Nemerov (Department of Art & Art History, Stanford University)
“Biology, Environment and Sound: Jakob von Uexküll Revisited”
    Veit Erlmann (School of Music, University of Texas at Austin)
“Shared Space”
    Brandon LaBelle (Artist, Berlin)

3:30 pm Coda
Joseph Clarke (School of Architecture, Yale University)

4:00 pm Closing Reception

Facial Vision - John Hull

At one point in his book, Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness, John M. Hull recounts the phenomenon that became particularly noticeable to him a few months after his descent into complete blindness.  In the following passage he describes 'facial vision' or 'echolocation,' when the body senses the presence of a nearby obstacle neither with sight, nor deliberate listening:

"The experience itself is quite extraordinary, and I cannot compare it with anything else I have ever known.  It is like a sense of physical pressure.  One wants to put up a hand to protect oneself, so intense is the awareness.  One shrinks from whatever it is.  It seems to be characterized by a certain stillness in the atmosphere.  Where one should perceive the movement of air and a certain openness, somehow one becomes aware of a stillness, and intensity instead of an emptiness, a sense of vague solidity.  The exact source of the sensation is difficult to locate.  It seems to be the head, yet often it seems to extend to the shoulders and even the arms.  Awareness is greater when the environment is less polluted by sound, and in the silence of my late evening walk home, I am more intensely aware of it.  In a crowded noisy street, the experience is less noticeable, and if I am travelling on somebody's elbow, I never seem to notice the experience at all.  Presumably, I just switch off whatever it is."  (pg. 27)

In addition to this sensitive description of the phenomenon, what I find fascinating is that Hull specifically states that the 'echo location' only becomes apparent when there was absolutely no visual input.  It is a sensing skill that is deeply embedded within the body which emerges only through the complete suppression of the visual sense, almost as a backup guidance system.  Concurrently, the ability to perceive one's environment in such a way is dependent on movement, and the continually shifting relationships between the body the space he inhabits.  Hull also describes that this type of sensing had a definitive spatial range.  At first, his ability to sense presence would only extend 3-5 feet from him, however, with time, and the body's calibration to increased sensitivity, that space stretched to 6-8 feet. 

"I gather from conversations that this experience is essentially acoustic and is based upon awareness of echoes. This certainly fits in with my experience, but at the same time it is important to emphasize that one is not aware of listening.  One is simply aware of becoming aware.  The sense of pressure is upon the skin of the face, rather than upon or within the ears.  That must be why the older name for the experience was "facial vision" (pg. 28)

This description immediately reminded me of the Alvin Lucier piece "Vespers" (1969) in which performers with Sondols (sonar-dolphin), hand-held pulse wave oscillators, explore the acoustic characteristics of given indoor or outdoor spaces by monitoring the echoes of the pulse waves off the walls, floors and ceilings, as well as any objects or obstacles in range of the sound waves. Over time, the listener receives an acoustic signature of the room.  Though the method is both imposed and much more coarse in the composition than in the similar phenomenon that occurs within the body, the concept is the same.