Other Acoustics/ Brandon LaBelle

From Oase: Immersed, Sound & Architecture, No. 78 (NAi, 2009).

If a work of architecture speaks only of contemporary trends and sophisticated visions

without triggering vibrations in its place, this work is not anchored in its site, and I miss
the specific gravity of the ground it stands on.1

The relation of sound and space brings forward a variety of possibilities as well as
tensions. Such dynamic may at times spark the imagination with a sense of wonder and
fantasy, while often leaving the route toward pragmatic realizations occluded. While
acoustics most readily applies to the making of sonic architectures, and which no doubt
contributes important elements to crafting space, it also generally limits its view toward
pragmatic goals. My interest here is to explore sound and architecture as an extended
aesthetic project that in turn raises questions pertaining to spatial experience and
imagination. To do so it seems important to initially understand sound on multiple levels
physical, social, psychological to open up ways it may come to converse with
architecture.

What is sound already doing?

Initially, sound unfolds as a dynamic relation between an inside and an outside. This
physical movement immediately occurs at the level of the ear without closure, the ear
radically permits the intrusion of the exterior onto the interior of the body, as well as
lending direction and orientation through proximity, the stereo-field, movement,
refraction, etc. As a spatial proposition, this mingling between inside and outside creates
a sense of immediacy, granting a flexible relation to questions of spatiality. We can
extend this by appreciating how sound originates from a source and travels toward a
distance. Resulting from a series of material frictions arising from a given object or body,
sound propagates, thereby leaving behind the original object or body. In this way, it
immediately crosses a number of boundaries, of the object itself, of given spatial
separations between rooms or related divisions, and finally, of the separation between
object (source) and subject (ear).
Secondly, to add onto this initial spatial proposition, sound is also carrying
messages. It functions as a communicational medium. As a physical and spatial
movement, sound carries a collection of information related to the conditions of the
original object or body, and the related environment. Importantly, this information also
grants animation to things: by stemming from an object or body, sound signals that
movement is occurring, and more so, that life is happening. Many spiritual traditions
understand sound as the voice of objects, of nature, of animals, etc., and the world as an
audible chorus whose multiple voices are continually speaking. Sound comes to radically
suggest or announce presence (even as recorded material).
Lastly, sound is also a significant social material. It affords a general sense of
sharing, and in doing so it potentializes relationships with emotional and psychological
charge. In granting or suggesting presence, sound immediately charges the environment
with a sense of relation, functioning as an emotive medium. To return to the observation
that sound stems from the friction of an object or body, carrying information across
borders and between inside and outside, such passing and movement is physically shaped
by the contours of the event of its occurrence sound, as many artists and performers
subconsciously understand, delivers psycho-social force by operating as a performative
medium.

Architecture
Following such thinking, sound seems to support notions of event-architecture,
participatory productions, and related performative aspects of space. Questions of the
immaterial and evanescent find support through an auditory materiality, and can be
looped through spatial thinking that sees in the built environment a vital perspective onto
the experiential. Yet sound may suggest such a link by also posing particular tensions.
For sound, in aiding in the sense of spatial borders also disrupts their clarity through its
continual movement, oscillation and vibration. As a communicative medium sound
carries information that is inherently temporal and evanescent it can only communicate
by always already disappearing. It thus supplies communication with a vital medium
while unsettling signification with mishearing. And finally, sound participates in the
making of communities while also exceeding the limits of shared values (noise). Static
form, the division of interior and exterior, and logics of rational space can be seen to gain
degrees of performative nuance and materiality through the dynamic range of sonority,
which guarantees a continual differential force.
Bernard Tschumi elaborates on the event of architecture through the theme of
violence stating, Bodies carve all sorts of new and unexpected spaces, through fluid or
erratic motions. Architecture, then, is only an organism engaged in constant intercourse
with users, whose bodies rush against the carefully established rules of architectural
thought.2 The movement of the body intrudes on the spatial features of architecture,
expressing an element of duration and inhabitation in relation to formal design. Such may
also be said of sound, as its event-oriented nature lends a dynamic material to the
contours of the built. As Juhani Pallasmaa proposes, sound gives to architecture a sense
of lived time, a register and medium for the movements of temporal exchanges, sharing,
and experience.3 In turn, it may provide a flexible means to be emotional, to share beyond
the strictly rational, and to shape relational experiences with a degree of immediacy.
Paul Carter, in his insightful article Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing, and
Auditory Space, gives a compelling examination of the auditory and acts of listening
through the theme of ambiguity.4 Claiming that listening, as a communicational device,
incorporates the pleasures and potentiality inherent to ambiguity, Carter stakes out a
productive territory in which mishearing and listening become openings onto a rich
process of sharing. For Carter, the ambiguous carries a dynamic sense of the erotic, as it
grants degrees of flexibility and surprise to semantic meaning. I would like to hold onto
Carters notion of productive ambiguity in teasing out the relation of sound and
architecture. For if we claim that sound and architecture may have something to give to
the other beyond the strictly acoustical, it may be on the level of making ambiguous the
strictly functional or spatial program of architecture while also contouring the audible
with degrees of material logic and spatial rigor. What interests me here is to suggest that
if architecture is to work with sound in ways that go beyond either acoustical fitting or
the placement of loudspeakers in designed spaces (the music model) it would benefit by
dropping many of its assumptions and taking sound on its own terms, which may
generate something not resembling much of architecture as we see it.5
Sound Art
I would like to continue by way of sound art as a particular cultural practice that often
fuse sound and space and in doing so give expression to imaginative spatial productions.
Generally, we can appreciate sound art as a practice that carries or performs
understandings of sound (as I have tried to map out), using sound to create physical,
communicational and social material while also appreciating how sound may disturb
existing patterns of behaviour or thinking.
Historically, we can understand that sound art also bridges the gap between music
and the visual arts, which greatly contributes to its aesthetic vocabulary. It does this in a
number of ways by drawing upon the acoustical and sensorial properties of sound; by
extending the notion of the musical instrument to that of environmental geographies; by
developing relational strategies that bring listening to the fore; and by staging social and
participatory actions through the perspective of the auditory.
Following such themes, we can understand how sound art unites musical ideas
related to composition, performance and sonic materiality with artistic notions of
conceptual, environmental and social relations. The early works of both John Cage and
Pierre Schaeffer can be highlighted here as setting the scene for sound to be mobilized for
opening up musical languages. For Cage, sound and by extension listening lead to a
renewed sense of musical strategies and modes of appreciating music in a spirit of
democratic and anarchic sociality: sound was used as a musical and social project so as to
generate forms of integration with everyday life and surrounding space. In contrast, the
work of Schaeffer and musique concrte sought to shape sound into isolated material
objects, generating compositions that activated the ear in quasi-scientific ways. Producing
elaborate analyses of sonic materiality, the relation of sound and space, and aspects of
psychoacoustics, Schaeffer worked through sound as a building material.
The development of sound art brings together this legacy of experimental music
practice concerned with material and embodied emphasis, while also drawing upon
artistic practices based on staging temporal and spatial events related to social practice
and public environments (as can be seen in the work of Fluxus and Actionism, along with
early conceptual art and performance projects). I might suggest that in the intermedial
practice of sound art, art brings to music aspects of critical thinking developed over the
last 40 years, whereas music brings to art degrees of sensitivity to the experiences of
listening, auditive sharing, and the instrumentation of electronics and performance. We
might say that sound art generally musicalizes environments as a means to detune our
ears toward a broader field of hearing. Through such work, questions of space and
architecture feature prominently, functioning as continual input into the project of sound
art.

Vibration
To detail this expanded view on sound and architecture, Id like to take up the theme of
vibration.6 Vibration may be understood to disrupt notions of acoustical fidelity
acousticians are generally bent on eliminating vibration as a form of intrusion onto sound
signalling as well as a potential hazard to the stability of buildings. Vibration may then
act as a productive counter-sonority to the acoustical sense of space, opening up to
rethinking what is proper to architecture. In addition, vibration lends a dynamic sonic
attribute that, in exceeding certain limits extends listening to a deeper and fuller
embodied presence and tactility. As Douglas Kahn points out, The constant deflection,
deference, and relationality found in figures of vibration had very important
consequences for the status of bodies and objects within space...Vibrations through their
veritable movement generated a structured space and situated bodies and objects in that
space. This process of situating did not outwardly transform the bodies or objects
themselves, however, it just placed them in an ever-dependent relation within a larger
system.7
Vibration functions as a spatial device put to use within sound art for the purpose
of drawing out an extensive corporeal relation to surrounding space, and as Kahn points
to, is suggestive of relationality and interconnectedness. It radically unites sound and
space in a complex intermingling that places the body in an immersive position.
Vibration may be said to create what Jean-Francois Augoyard and the researchers at
Cresson call a metabolic effect and which Bjrn Hellstrm refers to as a space where
all its constituent elements are in transition, and where the space simultaneously is
perceived as being the same over time. It is, thus a paradoxical situation since the
receiver perceives the space as a distinct whole, but not its constituent elements.8
Vibration reveals a spatial contour that overrides the visual geometry of
architecture, instead seeing in space linkages and relations that often pass through walls
and floors (and at times may overwhelm the listener). The field recording work of
Toshiya Tsunoda captures such linkages, and renders an evocative sonic picture of
existing environments. The works from his Solid Vibration CD highlight how vibration
phenomena not only extend the listening ear to that of tactility, to a feeling body, but also
how materials such as concrete, asphalt, fencing, doors and other solid forms are sensitive
resonating objects. For example, track 8 is the recording of a scrap of iron located in the
industrial yards of Yokohama port in Japan (where all of the works on the CD were
recorded). Using sensors placed directly on the iron object, the recording captures
vibrations occurring from a number of sources, such as vessels anchored on the outskirts
of the bay, and is heard as a stable humming sound.
Throughout the work Tsunoda seeks to record the environment of the port by
focusing exclusively on vibrations, revealing direct relations between an object in one
part of the bay and another at a distance, where the one produces a set of sound
frequencies while the other resonates in response, making the two a spatial duet. Through
tuning into the vibratory linkages surrounding a given environment, the artist gives us not
only an entry point into a sonic underworld, but a spatial theory that may come to
supplement notions of event-architecture. According to vibratory phenomena then,
buildings and environments are tuned and detuned by the interactions, frictions,
mechanics and general movements of immediate surroundings which at times far exceed
our expectations and which index a general economy of exchanges between subjects and
objects.
In addition, the work of Icelandic artist Finnbogi Ptursson harnesses much of the
phenomena of vibration in artistic projects, staging sensory productions that often operate
on the threshold of perception. Creating installations that utilize sub-sonic frequencies,
often below 10Hz, and situating them in relation to found or constructed spaces, the
works utilize the acoustics of space so as to situate a visitor within an overall sonic and
perceptual effect. His installation project, Water-Earth, is exemplary. Filling a portion of
a space with water, creating a pool to about one-meter height with light sources
submerged below the water, the work produces a series of ripples generated by vibration
produced from four speakers mounted in the space. The effect is to envelope the space in
sonic and visual movement, with ripples reflecting onto the surfaces of the space in a
continually expanding yet uniform formation that seems to dissolve the separation of the
given materials vibration, light, water and space congeal into a single generative
experience, that, like Tsunodas recording projects, grants sensorial perspectives that
incorporates one into a surprising interconnectedness.

Concluding
In Steen Eiler Rasmussens Experiencing Architecture, the author draws upon musical
composition as a metaphor for a number of perspectives onto appreciating architecture,
underscoring the communicative dynamic of the built environment.9 Since its writing in
1959, much has changed both in music and architecture, and the metaphoric relation
Rasmussen utilized seems to find more dramatic expression and ultimate realization in
todays culture. Perceptual, experiential, evanescent, durational and relational dynamics
that define and choreograph the ongoing exchange of people and places, earlier
expounded by Maurice Merleau-Ponty as the prose of the world, takes on weight within
digital paradigms that place emphasis on interconnectedness. With the introduction of
digital tools, sound and architecture find continual integration that no doubt will continue
to produce a bolder auditory culture wed to policies surrounding urban development and
design. What sound may aid in defining are modes of building that remain in tune with
the often ambiguous yet concrete material and immaterial exchanges taking place in
everyday life.
(1)Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture (Zrich,1998), 37.
(2)Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 123.
(3)See Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Sussex, UK:
Wiley, 2007).
(4)Paul Carter, in Hearing Cultures, ed. Veit Erlmann, (Oxford, 2004), 43-64.
(5)In a recent workshop I conducted at the Bartlett School of Architecture, I asked
students to produce physical models based on an audio recording of a specific home
environment. Through the process questions of translation and representation were
explored, resulting in a series of models that displayed both the difficulties in grappling
with sonic representation in visual and spatial form as well as the general process it takes
to begin to approach sound as specific phenomena. Such tensions are ultimately a
positive input into imagining spatial form and function.
(6)Vibration is but one among many themes or perspectives to be used in unpacking the
dynamics of sounds and spaces. Rhythm has also been explored, as in works by Henri
Lefebvre and Steen Eiler Rasmussen, as a means for mapping the events and composition
of architecture. See Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmnanalysis (London) and Steen Eiler
Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1961).
(7)Douglas Kahn, Wireless Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1992),15.
(8)Bjrn Hellstrm, Noise Design (Gteborg, 2003), 110.
(9) It is not enough to see architecture; you must experience it. You must observe how it
was designed for a special purpose and how it was attuned to the entire concept and
rhythm of a specific era. Rasmussens sense of the rhythmical hinges space, time and
experience together, interlocking architecture with the experiential and using rhythm to
bridge the divide between observing and feeling. Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Experiencing
Architecture, 33.