Journal of Architectural Education

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Hearing Architecture

Ted Sheridan & Karen Van Lengen

To cite this article: Ted Sheridan & Karen Van Lengen (2003) Hearing Architecture, Journal of
Architectural Education, 57:2, 37-44, DOI: 10.1162/104648803770558978

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Published online: 05 Mar 2013.

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TED SHERIDAN
New York
Hearing Architecture
KAREN VAN LENGEN
University of Virginia
Exploring and Designing
the Aural Environment

The potential of sound to inform and broaden architectural design criteria is examined both histori-
cally and in the context of current education and practice. Historically, periods of sophisticated aural
design have often been coupled with the oral traditions of preliterate societies whereas literate
cultures have produced architecture organized primarily according to visual logic. At present, acous-
tical engineering is typically applied to architecture in remedial fashion: either to completed buildings
or to designs already conceived along different sensory lines. A recent experimental studio intended
to explore the generative potential of aural design is documented as a possible prototype for sound-
inclusive curricula in schools of architecture.

Introduction I ence, and they have the potential to inuence the

Investigating the role of sound in the creation and
experience of architecture requires both an exami-
nation of how sound has inuenced design in the
past and consideration of its potential to do so
today. Beginning with a brief historical summary of
the relationships among sound, music, and the
forms of buildings, we argue for the inclusion of
broader-based design criteria in the academic design
studio and professional practice. This expanded
basis for design and criticism would include an
understanding and appreciation of the aural charac-
ter of buildings. To the extent that sound can be
integrated into the design and evaluation process,
the sonic aspect of buildings can be intentionally
articulated to achieve a richer, more satisfying built
environment: one that responds to the ear as well
as the eye.
The Žnal section documents an experimental
studio at the University of Virginia that analyzed the
proportional organization and aural qualities of the
UV Lawn and then asked students to develop a
sound-based design strategy for the alteration of
one of its spaces. The successes and difŽculties of
the student projects serve as a starting point for
exploring architecture’s largely untapped potential
to shape acoustical space in a positive and consid-
ered way.
The dominance of the sense of vision is a trademark
of contemporary Western culture and has driven the
development of its architecture since the Renais-
sance. In both theory and historiography, this domi-
nance preferences the image of buildings over the
actual experience taking place on multiple sensory
levels. When “architecture commands our attention
throughout history only as a visual art,”1 we greatly
diminish its full physical potential and limit the
depth of its study. Although visual culture supports
sophisticated and exhaustive means to envision
architecture, reŽne its appearance, and critique its
realization, it lacks equivalent established appara-
tuses to develop and evaluate buildings as sounding
forms. Nevertheless, the built environment exists
aurally as well as visually, and its aural qualities are
not simply a neutral background. The aural percep-
tion of space contributes to the experiential identity
of an environment. This occurs at a physiological
level where auditory cues suggest orientation, scale,
and subtleties of human interaction. It is often also
critical in establishing associations with the regional
qualities of our landscapes, thus creating a stronger
relation between the natural and man-made envi-
ronments. These aural interpretations provide addi-
tional layers of meaning to the architectural experi-
evolution of architecture’s visual form as well.
The visual and aural aspects of building design
are by no means mutually exclusive. Historically,
there have been close correlations between aural
and visual building traditions. However, when oral
cultures transformed into literate ones, visual priori-
ties tended to shape architectural form making, thus
reducing the primacy of sound-sensitive criteria. In
light of this, consideration of the sonic and musical
qualities of buildings can be a legitimate and fruitful
objective for contemporary teaching and practice.
Such an approach would offer two principle areas of
enrichment. First, it would open up the acoustical
environment as a kind of “material” for intentional
architectural development and articulation, giving
the designer another kind of material to shape while
altering and improving the aural environment. 2 Sec-
ondly, it would create the possibility for new archi-
tectural forms that, like the forms of musical instru-
ments, could evolve without preconceived visual
ends.
Recent advances in recording, digital editing,
and playback technologies have provided accessible
new means to store, manipulate, and analyze sound.
This compression of equipment to the size of a lap-
top computer has spawned a fascinating range of
self-recorded/self-produced work that uses ambient

37 sheridan and van lengen Journal of Architectural Education,

pp. 37–44 Q 2003 ACSA, Inc.
sound, the sounds of inhabitation, and sound inten-
tionally fed back through architectural spaces as its
medium.3 These compositions, which are truly spa-
tial in nature, provide a compelling “glimpse” into
the potential of aural tools to facilitate conceptions
of volume, constriction, passage, and stillness. The
same technologies are being used by acousticians to
quantify and analyze performance characteristics of
spaces. Modeling software derived in part from
visual ray-tracing algorithms can systematically cal-
culate reverberation times for complex room shapes
and determine early reection patterns relative to
each head point in a concert hall. This information
can be used to modify architectural designs to cor-
relate these sonic qualities with those of existing,
successful halls.4 In the process, it reveals new
geometries that create speciŽc acoustical conditions
and effects (even though these conditions and
effects are retroaudile in nature). This represents a
categorical advance over previous methods in that
“auralization,” as the software developers refer to it,
has never before been possible.
For the ambient musicians and acousticians,
architecture is a fertile territory of operation in spite
of the fact that their interaction with it is responsive
in nature; musicians extract their material from com-
pleted spaces whereas acousticians analyze architec-
tural designs that have already been developed, at
least schematically. In contrast, architects and stu-
dents of architecture are in a position to integrate
sound into their design work from the very begin-
ning, provided that some aspects of their design
methodologies and uses of technology are
expanded. Sound and music must be treated as vital
players in the history of buildings, and listening (as
well as looking) must be made part of design analy-
sis and criticism. Perhaps most importantly, the
tools of design must include media that can support
sonic conceptualization and exploration.
Historically, the awareness of sound has often
played a more central and generative role in the
design process than it does today. Commenting on
the birth of modern acoustics as a response to
“severe unintelligibility and lack of clarity from room
reverberation,” the American artist Bill Viola noted
that “ancient architecture abounds with remarkable
examples of acoustic design— whispering galleries
where a bare murmur of a voice materializes at a
point hundreds of feet away across the hall or the
perfect clarity of the Greek amphitheaters where a
speaker, standing at a focal point created by the
surrounding walls, is heard distinctly by all members
of the audience.” 5 From the Western perspective,
Vitruvius provides much insight into Roman knowl-
edge of acoustics. His writings also serve as a lens
through which one can glean an understanding of
earlier Greek consciousness of sound, music, and
architecture. In fact, Vitruvius devoted as much text
in The Ten Books on Architecture to sound, music,
and acoustics as he did to site design, materials,
and color— a level of attention unheard of in cur-
rent architectural writing. His treatises, and the
Romans’ sophisticated implementation of the
acoustic principles he expounded, demonstrate a
thorough understanding of acoustic phenomena and
the belief that sound and music are well within the
ambit of the architect’s knowledge and charge.
Vitruvius’ writings on sound deal with the topic
in essentially two modes: a proportional mode and
an “actual” mode. The proportional mode, in
Pythagorean fashion, relates the spatiovisual experi-
ence of width, height, and depth to the tonal expe-
rience of harmonic musical notes. Both reference a
normative, mathematical truth in the form of simple
numerical ratios. This theory by Vitruvius provides a
basis for linking the two types of experience and a
practical guide for sizing the various parts of build-
ings. Conversely, the Vitruvian “actual” mode relays
speciŽc advice, derived from experience and experi-
mentation, on how sound behaves under certain
physical conditions. The topics of propagation, 6
reection,7 and sympathetic resonance 8 fall into this
category and are often illustrated by speciŽc exam-
ples. Modern acoustics acknowledges both modes
as a split template for the engineering science that
exists today: split because Greco-Roman thinkers
did not have the tools to measure pitch as a func-
tion of vibration nor the means to understand
sound propagation in terms of the elastic behavior
of air. Lacking these principles, which would not be
fully understood until the nineteenth century, Greek
and Roman philosophies of sound remained doubly
rooted in number on the one hand and audition on
the other. It is in the realm of audition that the
Greeks and Romans had something irretrievable to
modern ears: the experience of the world in a space
undistorted by the effects of literacy.
In oral societies, like those of pre-alphabetic
Greece and Asia Minor, primary cultural exchange
and the preservation of collective memory took
place in “commemorative” fashion, that is, face to
face, with the rhythms and melodies of performing
bards weaving the extended story lines of epic
poems into coherent, communal events for their
audiences. 9 These events always took place aurally,
and both the experience and subsequent recollec-
tion principally hinged on the act of listening. This
not only exercised the ears, it suffused the very
fabric of consciousness, linking subjects and objects
in an “empathetic identiŽcation of knower and
known,” 10 and constituting space and time as “nei-
ther continuous nor uniform, but compassional and
compressional.” 11 In such “pre”-literate space, build-
ing forms tended to follow dynamic lines of force,
rather than the visual/orthogonal lines of organized
perspective.12 Grids and cubic forms did not sponta-
neously develop in this context, whereas circular,
triangular, and conical shapes existed in abundance.
Structures for secular and sacred use often com-
bined in visually nonhierarchical ways that differ
from the postliterate architecture we know today.
This preliterate architecture rarely emerged from its
surrounding context, natural or man made, to stand
Hearing Architecture: 38
Exploring and Designing the Aural Environment
 1. Pisistratid sanctuary at Eleusis, c. 500 b.c., perspectival sacred space in the context of literacy.

alone as an independent object “in space” obeisant

to perspectival logic and rationalization. 13 (See
Figure 1.)
Hellenic architecture, in contrast, evolved as a
visual construct following the invention of the
Greek phonetic alphabet. Unique among alphabets,
it was the Žrst writing system to fully replace the
evanescent, sound-based communication of
speech/song with a set of purely visual symbols
semantically unrelated to any of the “content” they
conveyed. That is, the phonetic system transcribed
the sounds of speech, not symbols or pictograms of
things themselves. This effected a massive shift in
what might be called the sensate equilibrium of
Greek citizenry between the time of Homer and the
time of Pericles: a shift from the ear to the eye
insofar as the voices of the rhapsodien gave way to
texts and the binding of social continuity within let-
ters.14 The mature Athenian Acropolis, which took
form in the midst of this transitional period, carries
the evidence of Greek oral/aural consciousness dis-
placed into literate space. It does so in two ways: by meaning.” 16 Romanesque and Gothic forms of detail to the entire corpus, creating (like the Bible
explicitly representing the epics in realistic15 statuary building ourished during a time when Northern itself) a Žxed representation of the word of God
and bas relief, and (at a structural level) through its and Western Europe’s insular oral cultures were while simultaneously providing an environment for
proportional, hierarchical, and perspectival organiza- exposed to the inuences of literacy through the the resuscitation of these words in real time. Le
tion of buildings. Acoustically, the Acropolis exists learned Latin of the church and subsequent written Thoronet, in particular, has attracted legions of lis-
as an inverse of traditional sacred architecture that forms of regional dialects. The strong aural sensitiv- teners17 and substantial commentary:
tends to embed itself in the sounds of life and liv- ity of the previous centuries, similar in ways to that
ing, and then cavitate space for worship or cere- of preliterate Greece, was carried into the architec- This enclosure has been constructed upon a
mony using both building(s) and music. Instead, the ture of the church and cathedral even as their precise, almost uncanny acoustical knowledge.
Acropolis orders a sequence of calculated visual “coherence and inner meaning” relied more and Here each sound, even a pin dropped at the
experiences bounded by highly reective at sur- more on the written word. While the Acropolis con- end of the nave some 40 meters away, gener-
faces largely open to the sky and distinctly set off stituted a kind of spatial displacement of the ates a full range of harmonic overtones . . . the
against the surrounding ambient background sounds aural/epic past of Greece into visual space, the nave is so sound-sensitive that one becomes
of Athens. abbeys and cathedrals that ranged across Europe aware that every body movement creates an
The architecture of the Gothic cathedrals, real- from Le Thoronet (Figure 2) in southern France to impact on the volume of air in the chamber.1 8
ized 1,400 years later, had as its origin a similar Santa Croce in Florence formed an array of sacred
period of ux in the lettered world: this time a re- resonators for the airing of the Christian word. They This sensitivity to the body and its movements
emergence of literacy from a long period of dor- did not bring an orally transmitted mythic past into and sounds is often credited with inuencing the
mancy. The transition to Gothic architecture in the visual space so much as they created a kind of rhythmic and harmonic structure of Western music.
1130s was “similar to what took place in law and visual envelope around the core aural experience of The long reverberation times created by the volumi-
literature: the written no longer merely recorded, the liturgy. These were structures that operated in nous Latin cross plans and hard-surfaced interiors of
but dictated the principles of coherence and inner both visual and acoustical realms from the smallest the cathedrals necessitated changes in the cadence

39 sheridan and van lengen

2. Cistercian Abbey at Le Thoronet, France.
and tonal delivery of words and song within the
spaces.19 Rhythms slowed and became more regular
to facilitate intelligibility of the liturgy. Vertically
organized harmonies evolved to take advantage of
the acoustical overlapping of successive tones.
Often described as devices for maximizing the
transmission of light through stained glass, divine
projectors of a sort, Gothic cathedrals are also
acoustical mirrors: structures that capture the mean-
dering lines of sounds past and rejoin them to the
present.
As musical composition evolved so did archi-
tecture, but not always in a supportive manner.
Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1427) and Andrea Pal-
ladio (1518–1580), bookends of the Italian archi-
tectural Renaissance, devoted much thought to
sound and music in the Vitruvian proportional
mode, that which emphasized the underlying
proportion-based continuity of music and architec-
ture. For Alberti, music and geometry were a unity,
fundamentally one and the same: “music is geome-
try translated into sound. In music the very same
harmonies are audible which inform the geometry of
the building.” 20 For Palladio, the same held true,
and, although he theorized less on the subject, at
least in written form, his buildings all utilize har-
monic proportions in plan, section, and elevation.
There is no doubt that both Alberti and Palladio
were aware of the Žrst stirrings of what has come to
be known as baroque music in the West: harmony-
based, ensemble playing using woodwind, string,
percussive, and early brass instruments. Compared
to simpler, vocal predecessors like the Gregorian
chant, motet, and hymn, this music generated far
more complex combinations of sound, putting tre-
mendous pressure on the acoustic form of the
church. Where Gothic architecture had effected a
harmonic rationalization of music, Renaissance
music, inversely, initiated a gradual increase in sonic
tension between new sounds people were learning
to hear and the architecture of the church. This
strain, exacerbated by technological improvements
in instrument construction and the conscious efforts
of counterreformers to make a visual spectacle out
of the mass, would eventually lead to a divergence
between classical music and the sacred architecture
that so inuenced its roots. Music, in effect, out-
paced its architectural context and required a new
kind of space to be adequately heard.
In the eighteenth century, orchestral music
came to require an architecture that did not yet
exist: an architecture that would itself orchestrate
the secular experience of music and would provide
an acoustical foundation for the ever more complex
harmonic and chromatic experimentation. The basic
form of the concert hall was the Žnal result, and it
remains a remarkably consistent typology to this
day.21 Symbolically, the visual and acoustical goals
of the concert hall were aligned in that they sought
to frame and support an unfettered and convincing
representation of music. Musicians were positioned
so that they formed the focal point of the audience
and were as close as possible to the bulk of the
listener-viewers. Initially, simple rectangular volumes
were the most common forms, but these eventually
gave way to fan-shaped halls that put more of the
audience closer to the musicians. Proximity, how-
ever, did not guarantee a better listening experi-
ence. As fan shapes widened, they produced greater
time gaps between the experience of direct sound
from the stage and reected sound from the side
walls of the hall. As these gaps grew, acoustical inti-
macy or the feeling of “closeness” to the music
diminished. Stacking the audience brought the side
walls in, but these balconies, with their own set of
acoustical effects, often made the experience of
sound inconsistent in different parts of the hall. The
history of concert hall design is, in fact, the story of
this struggle to create an architecture that has a
condensed acoustical envelope within a large,
expansive space.
Ironically, many of the so-called great concert
halls were designed before the core formulae of
acoustical science were developed. Modern acous-
tics, like the form of the concert hall, grew out of a
divergence between aural requirements and a par-
ticular building type, this time in the context of
American academia. In 1895, a twenty-seven-year-
old assistant professor in Harvard’s applied physics
department, Wallace Clement Sabine, investigated
the poor listening and speaking conditions in the
lecture hall of Richard Morris Hunt’s Fogg Art
Museum. The lecture hall was large for its time and
was intended to be the primary space for dialogue
in the museum. Its sight lines were good and its
appearance met all the expectations of the univer-
sity, but acoustically it failed: the audience could
not clearly hear a speaker at the podium, and the
speakers had difŽculty gauging their own voices as
they spoke. Sabine, through a series of ingenious
experiments and meticulous observations, discov-
Hearing Architecture: 40
Exploring and Designing the Aural Environment
 3. The Philips Pavilion, 1958 (Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis, and Edgard Varese).

ered the inverse relationship between the amount of

acoustically absorptive material in a space and its
reverberation time. This formed the basis for a fully
developed theory of architectural acoustics that he
applied to a number of signiŽcant buildings before
his death in 1919.22 The particular problem in the
Fogg’s lecture hall had been excessive reverbera-
tion: sound waves took too long to dissipate in the
room such that adjacent spoken syllables would
overlap and loose deŽnition. Sabine reduced rever-
beration time by introducing sound-absorbing
materials, “acoustical cushions” into the hall. 23
Sabine’s science would be required more fre-
quently as the century progressed and architects
began to adopt International Style modernism as
the functional and aesthetic basis for their designs.
Modern architecture, whose social aim was to pro-
vide a universal architectural language for the
“machine age,” did not acknowledge sound in its
evolution. Instead, architects built upon the princi-
ples of functionality, economy of construction, and
expression of structure: approaches that lead to
widespread use of the frame as a tectonic base and
visual paradigm for design work.
These building frames organized and sup-
ported some kind of inŽll, typically at, which cre-
ated modular bays enclosed by parallel surfaces.
Such volumes, in combination with highly reective
materials, like glass, metal, and concrete were prone
to a host of acoustic problems ranging from exces-
sive reverberation and unwanted noise to peculiar A notable exception to this is the Phillips Pavilion enced the design of concert halls and various public
resonance patterns that emphasized certain fre- by Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis, and Edgard Varese. spaces. Architecture schools often teach acoustic
quencies and dampened others. In particular, mod- This project, unique among early modern works, was design as part of a core curriculum, but to our
ern architecture’s tendency to eliminate ornament conceived from the start as both an aural and visual knowledge very little exploration has been done in
lead to spaces that had no physical means by which experience. Organized intentionally around a series the studio using sound as a generative thesis for
to evenly diffuse sound energy, a condition known of sonic concepts and strategies, the building’s Žnal design. As audio technology has become increas-
as acoustical glare. 24 From a sonic perspective, most form proved to be as visually fascinating as was its ingly available to test hypotheses about sound per-
modern architecture devolved into a series of inŽ- acoustic capacity to sculpt sound. (See Figure 3.) formance, we believe it is an optimal time to criti-
nitely reecting, internally mirrored spaces. By the cally examine this area with the aim of integrating
time scientiŽc acoustical principles were accessible the aural and visual environments.
to the design profession, an aesthetic movement II In the fall of 2000, we sponsored a studio at
had already gained momentum and had the effect Acoustic engineering has developed over the past the University of Virginia School of Architecture to
of limiting acoustical design to a remedial operation. century into a sophisticated Želd that has inu- explore this topic. The studio included both analyti-

41 sheridan and van lengen

cal and design components. In the analytical com-
ponent, we designed a series of exercises to intro-
duce students to the mechanical and cultural
aspects of sound. These observations were then
applied to the development of design proposals for
a site on the University of Virginia Lawn.
We presented students with a historical over-
view of sound and architecture that included an
introduction to ratio and proportion as they relate
to the harmonic series in music. Following that, the
class conducted a series of proportional studies on
spaces within and adjacent to the Lawn. These
studies generated a group of diagrams that mapped
out dimensional relationships of the Lawn and its
structures in plan, section, and elevation. Thomas
Jefferson’s knowledge of Palladian architecture sug-
gested the use of simple numerical ratios, and
indeed the students found many; unison: (1:1),
octave (1:2), Žfth (2:3), and fourth (3:4) all repre-
sented in interior and exterior spaces. The students
also noted acoustic effects resulting from the differ-
ent sizes and shapes of rooms. They perceived
intensity of sound to be greater along central axes
of certain rooms and often in corners. They noted
minor differences between rectilinear rooms with
differing proportions, but these were overshadowed
by the distinct variation between rectilinear and
elliptical spaces found in the Rotunda. Comparing
rectilinear spaces to curvilinear spaces, students
made consistent subjective judgments about their
differing aural qualities. The rooms with curved
walls exhibited pronounced areas of sound focus
including strong “whispering gallery” effects that
created a disjunction between the visual and acous-
tic distance between two speakers.
We then asked the students to document a
space (or spaces) that had evoked a personal mem-
ory of sound. They used various methods of repre-
sentation, including digital, collage, and pencil-and-
ink renderings. Sometimes their memories resulted
in abstract or interpretive representations, whereas
others documented the actual place of the sound
by delineating its architectural features. In some
cases, movement through the remembered spaces
constituted the sonic memory, and in other cases
the memories were musical, where a structure or
space had inuenced a musical experience in a
powerful way. In all instances, there was a temporal
element to the memories involving duration, either
a period of passage or a sequence of changing
sounds. This exercise encouraged the awareness of
sound and a methodology for recording it in diaries.
The representative language of each diary evolved
individually with our expectation that this method
would encourage each designer to develop a consis-
tent method of sonic recording. Subsequent assign-
ments referenced these initial efforts that served as
a beginning to the design process.
Following the proportional and memory-based
studies, students executed timed and focused sound
inventories within the previously measured areas of
the Lawn and its buildings. These documented the
full aural experience of the spaces, detailing sounds
by type as well as intensity and tracking patterns of
change over different periods of day and night.
Pairs of students carried out each inventory with a
blindfolded listener and a seeing “recorder” who
kept track of time and took notes. They then trans-
posed the data onto timelines with two aspects of
the listening experience, loudness and proximity of
sound, graphed in superimposition or noted in par-
allel. The sound lists revealed a surprising degree of
acoustic overlap between adjacent but visually sepa-
rate spaces. They also captured audible connections
between entirely separate areas depending on the
frequencies of the source.25 One clear example that
emerged was that of the aural link between the
main dining room of Pavilion IX and the Lawn out-
side. The colonnade creates a directional acoustical
bridge from the exterior to the interior. Sounds that
would normally dissipate up and away from the
façade are “captured” by the colonnade’s roof,
reected back down and through the front walls
and windows into the pavilion’s front rooms. This
has the effect of bringing the walkway and Lawn
into at least one of the private spaces of the pavil-
ion, but it does not work in reverse, from the pavil-
ion interior to the exterior. (See Figure 4.)
These observations helped create an apprecia-
tion of the difference in the sensory limits of visual
and acoustic space: the discrete visual space of
interior rooms is always circumscribed (or circum-
sounded) by a larger acoustic Želd. Analogies were
drawn between visual transparency and acoustic
overlap, where clearly discernable sounds are trans-
mitted through and around visual boundaries.
Where more distant sounds are present but are dis-
torted or Žltered, the students used the analogy of
translucence.
The class then made recursive recording stud-
ies of three interior spaces: the small axial ellipse of
the rotunda, the large western ellipse of the
rotunda, and the main dining room (formerly a
classroom) of Pavilion IX. The recursive recording
process was demonstrated by the musician/artist
Alvin Lucier in his installation of 1981, I Am Sitting
in a Room. The process starts by recording the
ambient sound and or speciŽc sets of sounds in a
space and then playing the recording back into the
space while recording on a second machine. The
second recording is then played back into the room
and recorded a third time and so on. This process
generates a composite sound made up of the natu-
ral frequencies of the room; through reiterative
recording, the initial tones are progressively trans-
formed into a sound that reects the “natural”
acoustic contours of the space. As a means of dem-
onstrating the acoustic qualities of a room, this
method is particularly effective because it builds
gradually from the normal background to a highly
ampliŽed version of the same. The process does not
convert acoustic conditions to a set of numerical
values, as does a decibel meter or reverberation
gauge; rather, it keeps the results in a sonic form
that interacts in a progressively stronger and
stronger way with the space. After this exercise,
students were signiŽcantly more aware of how the
room modulated normal sounds like their voices, the
Hearing Architecture: 42
Exploring and Designing the Aural Environment
sounds of movement, and the structurally transmit-
ted sounds of mechanical equipment and systems.
The Žnal recordings of the three spaces were
different, with the most noticeable difference being
between the elliptical meeting rooms and the recti-
linear dining room. The rectilinear dining room gen-
erated a tone that stabilized very quickly and had
what the students called “an instrumental quality”
like a “trumpet or trombone.” The elliptical rooms
required a greater number of reiterations to stabi-
lize, and the results were “more complex sounding”
with more “utter and variation.” At the end of the
course, after not hearing the recordings for three
weeks, the students were still able to identify the
different rooms through sonic identiŽcation using
the tape recordings.
With this information gathered, students began
a design problem sited in the dining room of Pavil-
43 sheridan and van lengen
ion IX. As mentioned earlier, this room has an
eavesdropping effect that forms an aural connection
to the public space outside. We asked the students
to design a response to that particular acoustic con-
dition using their knowledge of acoustics and artic-
ulated sound as a primary and intentional beginning
to the design problem. They considered the current
acoustic conŽguration of the structure and the
sounds of the surrounding environment as the
“site.”
In most cases, students grafted a secondary
program such as eavesdropping or sound genera-
tion. In the cases of eavesdropping, the architec-
tural interventions tended to take the form of shells
or curved insertions into the colonnade or into the
rectangular dining room. The façade was typically
punctured or layered to relieve or buttress its action
as a sound Žlter. These projects relied on a modiŽ-
cation of the existing architecture, as opposed to
electronic means, to achieve the desired Žnal effect.
(See Figure 5.)
These devices sought to organize the transmis-
sion of sound in and out of the dining room. As
formal ideas developed, the visual results began to
suggest ways to play visibility against audibility. One
strategy allowed vision and hearing to alternately
dominate the experience of passage into the room.
This raised awareness of how the senses interact.
The most successful eavesdropping projects chose
simple, bold shapes that, based on the prefatory
exercises, could produce a predictable result. In
cases in which sound reection, refraction, or dif-
fraction were key to the concept, simple ray dia-
grams could clarify and support formal decisions.
Typically, where sound generation was a funda-
mental goal, students developed analogies to musi-
6. Student project — Musical Table.
Design and drawing by Derek West.
cal instruments. Programmatic elements like walls,
tables, and chairs were modiŽed to create a kind of
“music of inhabitation.” Spaces surrounding the
dining room were reconŽgured to act as resonators,
picking up and amplifying the sounds. These proj-
ects were interesting in that they proposed a trans-
formation of casual occupancy into an aural or
musical event wherein architecture served as both
instrument and choreographer. (See Figure 6.)
Both the eavesdropping and musical strategies
were typically developed using the visual conven-
tions of architectural design and representation.
During reviews, this generated several fruitful dis-
cussions about the limitations and inherent visuality
of orthographic drawing, scale models, and perspec-
tive renderings. In one case, the sound of the jury
was being monitored and displayed spectrographi-
cally in real time as comments were made and ques-
tions asked. Speakers became more self-conscious
of the sounds they made, as if the review had been
designed as an actual installation.
We found that one of the most challenging
aspects of this kind of studio is to effectively pre-
sent an intended acoustical result. Unless actual
sounds are a component of the development and
presentation of a project, its degree of “success”
must be based on a partial demonstration or on
speculation as to its actual sound or modulation of
existing sounds. Unlike visually based projects rep-
resented in drawing or model form, sound and
music do not lend themselves to abstracted or
scaled-down representations. This difŽculty may be
alleviated in the future by the increasing accessibil-
ity of new technologies that can effectively predict
and measure sonic results. As we thought about
editing our course, we concluded that this studio
would be enhanced by the introduction and use of
some of the newer technologies as well as full-scale
models of sound spaces to bridge the representa-
tional gap between spatial conception and aural
result. Schools of architecture already offer students
design-build studios, and the computing power
required to support new auralization software is, by
now, standard fare. Recent visual trends in architec-
tural design that utilize complex faceted surfaces
and compound curvature have the potential to cre-
ate strongly articulated acoustic spaces as well.
Therefore, this might be a moment to reengage
sonic design concepts and considerations with the
visual design process. This would be new territory
for many, but perhaps it could create a space for
teachers and students to work together to develop
an entirely new perspective on the making of con-
temporary architecture.
Notes
1. Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman, Architecture, from Prehis-
tory to Post-Modernism (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), p. 41.
2. In this case, the aural environment is considered “arbitrary” from the
perspective of most architectural design and criticism. For a broader dis-
cussion of the relationship between sound and cultural power, see R.
Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning
of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994), pp. 74 –78.
3. See David Toop, Ocean of Sound (London: Serpents Tail, 1995),
pp. 33 –66, for a particularly cogent summary of the ambient music
movement of the 1990s and a thorough discography of its participants.
4. A recent successful example is the new Tokyo Opera City Concert
Hall by architect Takahiko Yanagisawa and acoustician Leo Beranek,
which was completed in 1997 and recently ranked sixth in the world for
excellent acoustics.
5. Bill Viola, “The Sound of One Line Scanning,” in Sound by Artists
(Toronto: Art Metropole, 1990), p. 41.
6. Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture (New York: Dover, 1960),
pp. 138– 139.
7. Ibid., pp. 147–148.
8. Ibid., pp. 143–145.
9. Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman, Information Ages: Liter-
acy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1998), pp. 14– 15.
10. Walter Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Con-
sciousness and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 18;
and Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1964), pp. 169– 190.
11. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 84.
12. Ibid., p. 125.
13. Examples abound in twentieth-century anthropological studies of
nonliterate cultures, a few of which include Jean-Paul Bourdier and
Trinh T. Minh-Ha, African Spaces (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985);
Edmund Carpenter, Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! (New
York: Bantam, 1972); and Chants de Orée de la Foret: Polyphonies des
Pygmies Efe (CD Fonti Musical: 1987).
14. Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Pop-
ular Mind (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), pp. 23 –28; and
Ulrich Conrads and Bernard Leitner, “Audible Space: Experiences and
Conjectures,” Daidalos 17 (Sept. 1985): 28– 32.
15. The term realism generally refers to visual or perspectival realism,
eliding the fact that perspectival correctness itself is culturally condi-
tioned. For a comparison of alternate representational realism, see “See-
ing on the Round,” in Carpenter, Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave
Me!, p. 29.
16. Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and
Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 82.
17. See/Hear David Hykes and the Harmonic Choir, Harmonic Meetings
(CD 14013-2 Celestial Harmonies: Tucson, 1986).
18. Robert Lawlor, “Geometry at the Service of Prayer: Reections on
Cistercian Mystic Architecture,” Parabola 3:1 (Jan. 1978), pp. 12– 13.
19. Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 1959), pp. 226– 231.
20. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism
(West Sussex: Academy Editions: 1998), p. 19.
21. For a comprehensive overview of concert hall forms, including full
commentary on their acoustics, see Leo Beranek, Concert and Opera
Halls: How They Sound (Woodbury, NY: Acoustical Society of Amer-
ica/American Institute of Physics, 1996).
22. Most notably, Symphony Hall in Boston, which still ranks in the top
three worldwide for symphonic music. See Wallace Clement Sabine, Col-
lected Papers on Acoustics (Los Altos, CA: Peninsula Publishing, 1993).
23. Ibid., pp. 10–13.
24. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural
Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America 1900– 1933 (Cam-
bridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), pp. 209– 210.
25. Typically, low-frequency sounds had the ability to bridge greater
distances and degrees of separation between disparate spaces.
Hearing Architecture: 44
Exploring and Designing the Aural Environment