RECAP #5 - "The Sound of Architecture" at Yale School of Architecture

Yale School of Architecture
"The Sound of Architecture"
October 6, 2012 9am - 11am

Collective Sonic Spaces and Public Privacy

Bright and early on Saturday morning (armed with a chocolate croissant and a superfood smoothie), I headed over for the final day of the symposium. The day began with an exploration of “how sound and space intersect to address notions of public and private.”

CIVIC NOISE

Niall Atkinson “On the Aural Creation of Urban Communities in Early Modern Italy”
                Atkinson started us off with the presentation organized around a selection of letters in which the authors, including Seneca, Anton Francesco Doni, Pliny, Machiavelli, and Bronzino, addressed their relationships with urban sounds. Atkinson sought to understand how these aural conditions were the result of architectural situations. For instance, Seneca describes the sounds outside his apartment located above the baths where he could observe the activity and conversation occurring below. Arthur Schopenhauer complains of the incessant cracking of whips outside his window and goings on of the neighbors next door (as he tries to write/read/play the flute) which he can hear because the walls are shared. Anton Francesco Doni observes that as the distinction between public and private, outside and inside are collapsed, one listens more intently. The desire for silence in Pliny’s Laurentine villa describes the effectiveness of a room within a room in order to achieve a space of silence and tranquility.

“Adjoining this is a bedroom, which neither the servants’ voices, the murmuring of the sea, the glare of lightning, nor daylight itself can penetrate, unless you open the windows. This profound tranquillity and seclusion are occasioned by a passage separating the wall of this room from that of the garden, and thus, by means of this intervening space, every noise is drowned.”

In general, I found Atkinson’s talk engaging and thought provoking as it directly placed experiences of an auditory nature in relation to architectural structures, thereby encouraging us to question how qualities like the porosity of walls or the density of houses begins to impact our daily lives. 

Tim Barringer “The Architecture of Victorian Oratorio”
                Barringer followed Atkinson with a lively talk addressing the notion that musical form and architectural form are inherently linked. Moving from the example of the 1859 Crystal Palace which was, among other things, a site for monumental musical performances, Barringer takes us to the Birmingham Town Hall where Felix Mendelssohn's oratorio, "Elijah", was first performed in 1846. Oratorios, he explained, were the dominant form of art in Victorian England and stand in contrast with opera in that they usually deal with religious topics and often the Biblical word. Next he discussed Leeds Town Hall, which was constructed in 1859 and which physically expressed the importance of musical performance by placing the concert hall at the very center of the building while local governmental offices surround it (see plan below). This new architecture demanded new music, and it was delivered by William Walton who, with the debut performance of Belshazzar’s Feast in 1931 incorporated his interest in jazz and (rather spontaneously) the sounds of brass bands (linked to working class mills bands) into his religious cantata. Regardless of whether the architectural connection was ever really explicitly drawn, I was really enjoyed this lecture. This may have had to do in part with the fact that I had never heard most of the works whose excerpts were played before (such wonderful pieces!), but also could have been because I do love listening to a lecture given by someone with a British accent!

John Picker “Noise and Public Privacy in the Stethoscopic Era”
                Picker, author of “Victorian Soundscapes”, began his presentation with a Superman theatrical short from the early 1940s, in which we witness the man of steel’s phone booth transformation from unassuming journalist to superhero. Picker continued with the structure of the phone booth as the main topic of investigation, considering their contemporary re-use (as wi-fi hotspots, pop up libraries or sites for street art), in addition to their emergence and evolution as a space that mediates public privacy. While telephone companies originally rented space from drug stores in order to place them within easy access of the public, telephones eventually moved out of the store and onto the street in order to allow for greater control by the telephone companies. I really appreciated the specific focus of this lecture and found it to be informative and engaging. I only wish that the presentation could have taken the next step and proposed a future structure for the contemporary “floating user”. I found that this last step was lacking in general across the entirety of the symposium. Where were the creatives suggesting ways to engage sound and architecture in the future? Why did it seem that pretty much all presentations were concerned with historical analysis and past precedents, and much less with the active engagement with the topic today?

J.D. Connor “Listening to Carchitecture”
                Connor’s talk centered on the “most widely regulated precision tuned space”, the interior of a car. He framed the lecture through the lens of several car advertisements which emphasized the promise of the car as a sonic bubble within which the driver and passengers are shielded from the confusing, noisy environment of the city streets. Starting with the magazine spread: “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.” all the way to a clip of Elliot Scheiner describing the surround sound audio tuning system he helped develop for selected Acura vehicles, and touching upon Hyundai Azera “Modern Life”, VW Jetta “Synchronicity” (this is one of my favorite cars ads ever), and Kia Soul commercials along the way, Connor presented these spaces as intensely interior, offered as a way of escaping civic noise. Public sounds are part of the landscape, and the city exists as an immersive environment through which we are constantly navigating. In a way, the personal space of the car allows us to create a non-linear experience where we have control over what is perceived, thereby superimposing, or rather, embedding, our own desires on the space of the city. Conner skimmed over a couple other interesting points one of which was the issue of “sound branding” and question of what a particular brand of car should sound like. Another, was the role reversal of the interior environment of the car from an insulated and private space, to an active contributor to the “noise” of the city, not only through the sound the car generates itself, but through the leakage that occurs with powerful modern sound systems. I could have seen a whole lecture based around the last topic which to me started to challenge the boundaries of public and private space through the notion of leakage and intrusion.