Aural Architecture Research Articles

Experiencing Sounds in Ancient Spaces: An Overview

This paper aims to analyse recent studies which have raised new hypotheses concerning archaeomusicology, archaeoacoustics, and aural architecture as an emerging trend in humanities research, with a particular focus on the intersection of musical performances, theatrical spaces, and sound experience in the past. These studies have highlighted how theatrical buildings not only defined a place for performances, but also established the setting for multisensorial events in which music, dance, and other sonic events played an important role. This overview also takes into consideration how digital technologies can help shape our understanding of the architecture-sound nexus.

Listening in Sacred Spaces: The Sanctuary of Poseidonia and Selinunte’s Main Urban Sanctuary

Abstract The aim of this work is to analyse recent studies which have raised new hypotheses concerning aural architecture as an emerging trend in humanities research, with a particular focus on the intersection of sacred space, rituals, and sound in the past. These studies have highlighted how sacred buildings not only defined a sacred place as a physical and symbolic expression of a specific form of worship but also established the setting for performative and multisensorial ceremonies in which music, dance, and other sonic events played an important role. In this contribution, we investigate studies on aural architecture to explore if the location of sacred spaces indicates whether ancient people reacted to ritual and musical developments by modifying sanctuaries or by designing and constructing new buildings and spaces for performances. In addition, this article explores studies on aural architecture to obtain an overview of how specific sonic features could have influenced the soundscape of sacred spaces, which consisted not only of songs, music, prayers, recitations and religious sonic and vocal utterances but also of natural elements, such as animals, water, and wind. This overview also takes into consideration how digital technologies and virtual acoustics can help shape our understanding of the architecture-sound nexus.

Notes on the Aural Aspects of Built Environment

Aural architecture might seem at the first sight as some oddity, a deliberately unique niche genre, and an out-of-the-ordinary hue on the wide spectrum of built environments. In contrast, the essay overviews some of the most important aspects that foster a broader conceptualization of architecture conceived as substantially interlinked with the sonic realm. In comparison with the established discourse on soundscape, this writing does not start from fieldworks and empirical-based terms with the goals of a general theorization but works the other way around: it arrives at the notion of soundscape in its conclusion by pointing out the unsatisfying nature of any conception of architecture that misses the aural aspects of architectural space, hence excluding a crucial somaesthetic dimension both from theoretical discourse and designer practice.

“Sonic Spaces for the Stray”: (Dif)Fusing Dis-location in Sound Installation and Performance

This project examines subjectivity and its embodiment through the application of interactive electronics within sound installation and performance. It employs a merging of theory, method and practice that has not been fully researched to date and which represents a valuable addition to sound performance and electroacoustic composition. My artistic research focuses on an ongoing series of improvisational/compositional experiments, moving between a dedicated workspace and sound production studios where I will work with acousticians, engineers, and programmers. The aim is to develop gestural/embodied approaches for applying interactive electronics within sound performance and fixed-media composition—mining tensions between failure and fluency; and diffusion strategies that highlight correspondences between embodiment, sound and space—emphasizing tensions between absence and presence. Foundational research includes studying methods and applications for investigating spatialization and psychoacoustics, employed by artists including Maryanne Amacher. I will also study concepts/methods developed by artists such as George E. Lewis, focusing on interaction between algorithmically-based technology tools and physical gesture in musical improvisation. This research also engages with Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytically-based writing on abjection and the sublime, grounding my studio-based research in theoretical inquiry that engages with subjectivity and embodiment. Supplementary research will address psychoacoustics, aural architecture, and spatialization theory and technologies. The outcome of the project will be twofold: a body of sound installations and performances demonstrating an interactive approach to addressing relationships between the body, materiality, sound, space and situation; and a set of reflective writings that articulates the poetics and affective aspects of this multi-layered inquiry. The completed project will offer new knowledge production in the field of artistic research, and transmission of interdisciplinary knowledge to creative practitioners.

The sonic strategies and technologies of listening alone together in The World According to Sound’s Outside In: A Communal Listening Series

This article examines three dimensions of Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett’s practices for producing, sharing and listening to audio in collective and social ways for The World According to Sound’s Outside In: the sonic strategies and soundscape design used to engage communal and collective listening, how Outside In adapts and transforms traditional paradigms using the broadcast medium of the podcast to aesthetically engage with liveness and the corporeality of sound, and how the COVID-19 pandemic afforded space for ‘unpopular’ soundwork based on everyday aural architectures (e.g., field recordings, ambient music, experimental music based on everyday sounds, soundscape collages) that are popular, as in, of the community. Using varied examples drawn from The World According to Sound’s soundwork, I illustrate a particular set of sonic strategies to imagine sonic space, listen relationally to sound events, and enact a sociality of collective listening.

Urban Contemplative Architecture Design through Light and Sound

This study aims to formulate the design factors for contemplative architecture in an urban context. The ability of architecture to influence the atmosphere and the experience of its users is the basis of research. Theoretical analysis is used to find the connection between elements that can trigger subjective properties to form a contemplative space both direct or indirectly. The quality of secular sacredness that is often associated with contemplative experiences has been elaborated as well. Secular sacred that does not depend on religious connotation and divinity are used to focus the attention solely on architectural elements in shaping one’s experience. The two main factors that shape architectural experience are light and sound. By exploring the characteristic and manipulation of light, sound and aural architecture, the feeling of sacredness can be created through spatial experience. By using the theory of contemplative space properties as the main theory, the theory of light and sound will work as supporting theory in formulating the design factors for contemplative architecture. The theory framework then is read on design project, to find how they work and what is missing. At the end, this study produces a prototype of contemplative architecture design for urban context through light and sound.

Aural Architecture as Affect: Understanding the Impact of Acoustic Environments on Human Experience

Aural Architecture as Affect: Understanding the Impact of Acoustic Environments on Human Experience

Making Home, Making Sense: Aural Experiences of Warsaw and East Galician Jews in Subterranean Shelters during the Holocaust

This essay examines the depictions and interpretation of auditory experiences in a sample of Jewish diaries that were written in underground bunkers, earthen dugouts and cellars beneath urban centres in and around Warsaw and in the rural region of East Galicia in World War II. Concepts from musicology and sound studies are applied to model the subterranean dugouts as instances of “aural architecture” set through with perforations channelling the flow of sound from the outside. This highlights and contextualizes important aspects of how Jews in East Galicia inhabited their shelters. In particular, it draws attention to various sound-related bodily techniques and to more complex practices, such as surveilling “the outside” and the adapted routines of homemaking that shaped daily life in these hiding places. The essay further posits an interrelationship between the acoustic conditions in the hideouts and the imaginative descriptions employed by the authors to describe their hideouts. Examining what the diarists could hear of the outside world, and how it sounded to them in their shelters, helps account for marked differences in how they made sense of their current life conditions. Depending on both the nature of the sounds that could be heard, and their penetration and spatial localization underground, the diarists interpret the confines of their hideouts by using metaphors variously underlining protection and social exclusion.

Spatial Design and Aural Experience in Music Schools in Lagos State

Sound has the ability to affect people psychologically, physiologically, behaviourally and cognitively, either negatively or positively, at all times and in all places. Architecture plays a key role in shaping sound, and in defining a certain soundscape. Architectural discourse is often dominated by visual design while the aural architecture becomes a result of the visual decisions, despite that all five senses are important to the experience of a space. Designing our soundscapes, both inside and out, is essential to creating environments which are conducive to their intended function, and do not negatively affecting inhabitants. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between design strategies commonly adopted in existing music schools in Lagos State and the aural architecture it creates. In order to do this, this study has used existing literature, information from case studies and also data from the users of the existing music schools to identify the current design strategies in the music schools and how they affect the aural experience of the users. Findings show that the design strategies adopted had significant relationships with the aural architecture of the spaces, the most prominent design strategy adopted was the rectangular geometry and very little aural architecture strategies were adopted. With this understanding a tuned aural architecture design is proposed, exploring material and design manipulations, which help to create a more beneficial and enriching environment.

The queen is dead; long live the queen? Hearing voices and sounds beyond the human

Any (re)turn to sound to be radical must displace the human voice as the source of authenticity and raison d’etre of communication and argumentation studies and instead turn to both the ubiquitous mediascapes and cacophonous voices of the earth that compose the aural architectures that form, deform, and transform us. Such a move opens up the possibilities of engaging sound in its myriad manifestations. This essay suggests that opening ourselves to being startled by other sounds calls for a sound turn that abandons nostalgic dreams of speech and voice and explores the always already mediated voices and sounds of tech soundscapes and the many-voiced landscapes we dwell in. Such a sound turn will hear different orations, recognize other speakers, and analyze worlds infused with infinite and strange intelligences, providing creative opportunities that will refigure our imaginations.AbbreviationsSCASpeech Communication AssociationNCANational Communication Association.

Aural Architecture in Byzantium. Music, Acoustics, and Ritual ed. by Bissera V. Pentcheva

Aural Architecture in Byzantium. Music, Acoustics, and Ritual ed. by Bissera V. Pentcheva

The calibration of an aural spatial mapping tool using an architectural approach to the soundwalk method: A validation study

A series of on-site surveys are conducted as part of the validation process of a research seeking to create a tool that integrates the theoretical spatial and soundscape design concepts, to aid architects when considering sound as a design driver for urban design. The investigation is founded on establishing a relationship between aural architecture theories and the urban spatial experience and design. The surveys are pattern validation experiments that aim to observe possible qualitative aural pattern formations occurring within Covent Garden Market in London by using spatial measurements as fundamental parameters. The method assimilates the Soundwalk technique and the Relative Approach from the fields of soundscape and psychoacoustics, respectively, and are integrated within a customary architectural site-survey proposed to map the sonic morphology of urban spaces. The experiment is designed to compare the tool’s preliminary prediction patterns to in situ listening and the spectral patterns recorded. The patterns are assumed to deviate at this point because not all sound factors are considered, and the patterns are assumed qualitative. However, the discussed comparative process aims to establish value in the current state of this aural mapping tool and establishing the limitations provide an opportunity for further development.

Sounding Place, Performing Knowledge: the exploratory and the performative in the soundscape composition Resounding Reverie

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the balance between performative and exploratory actions in soundscape composition through a consideration of the author’s fixed media composition, Resounding Reverie. Soundscape composition, particularly in this case, is characterised as an embodied practice expressing both performative and exploratory practices. The creative processes used in making Resounding Reverie show that through embodied interaction with a particular acoustic space, and using audio technologies and attendant gestures as prosthetic practices, the composer initiated exploratory actions that both expressed his habitus and made room for new acoustic discoveries through exploratory ‘groping’ to establish a form of contact with the affordances of this nexus of ‘aural architecture’, technology, and agency. An mp3 recording of Resounding Reverie may be found at the following link: https://andrewczink.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/t1_resounding-reverie_mp3.mp3

Auditions: architecture and aurality

In Auditions, Rob Stone proposes a new and transformative view of architecture and sound. He offers a radical rethinking of the inhabitation of architectural space in terms of its acoustic dimensions, presenting a concept of aurality as an active, speculative, yet conditional understanding of the complexity of social spaces. The aural architectures he discusses are assembled from elements of architecture and music -- including works by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and John Cage -- but also from imagined spaces and other kinds of less obviously musical sounds. Stone presents a series of aural-architecture moments, each of which brings architectural space into conversational relationships with extra-architectural concepts and perceptions, often suggested by other art forms and social practices. He considers, for example, the acoustic themes of a silent movie; Greg Louganis's failed dive at the Seoul Olympics and the moral values attached to water in architecture; the custodianship of high culture at a second-hand classical record shop in London; and hair (as in the conductor's hairstyle) as a mediating form between music and architectural space. In Auditions, Stone brings together and revises the canonical instances of sound's relationships with architectural spaces, and he does so by granting new kinds of spatial agency to sound. Sound is not only a portal into otherwise imperceptible aspects of architecture but also a reflection on the concepts that produce our expectations of architecture.

Experimenting with spaces of encounter: Creative interventions to develop meaningful contact

To-date geographical research on encounters has primarily comprised observation of naturalistic settings (both micro publics and everyday public spaces) or narrative accounts of encounters generated by conventional methods, this paper focuses on a contrived spatial experiment to create meaningful contact across difference. Inspired by, and drawing on insights from, Architecture – a discipline relatively neglected by geographers in recent times – we use a creative form of spatial play to stimulate groups of people to explore their differences and to develop shared understandings. Whereas previous studies have identified the importance of material objects in art projects and home spaces in mediating relations between people, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the physical configuration of space in work on encounters, despite the fact that geography is a spatial discipline. Here, we engage directly with the role of the form and function of space. Our spatial experiments demonstrate how paying attention to the materiality of micro-spaces rather than social relations alone, can provide insights into the generation of positive interactions by contributing to a greater understanding of how meaningful encounters happen, and what can be done to facilitate them. Specifically, by exploring the size and configuration of space, issues of ownership and surveillance, the relationship between primary and secondary space, and aural architecture this research identifies how working together to create a shared private or intimate space – might facilitate a sense of empowerment and the production of social relations characterised by democracy and inclusion.

Arhitektura i muzika/zvuk - tačke susretanja, umrežavanja, sadejstva

This paper is devoted to perceiving the relationship between music and architecture, namely, the discourses which interpret, research, value these two practices in the context of their mutual networking. In that respect it is possible to set aside several problem strongholds which will make the focus of this paper, and which concern: the history of forming and evolution of discourse on the inter-relationship of these two practices; modernist, avant-garde and postmodernist problematization of music and architecture; theories of the artists as a field of music and architecture networking; the interaction of music and architecture on the technical and formal level; spatiality of sound, i.e., sound/music propagation in space and the emergence of the new art concepts based on this principle (sound architecture, aural architecture, sound art).

Mobile Web Browsing with Aural Flows: An Exploratory Study

Existing web applications force users focus their visual attention on mobile devices while browsing content and services while on the go. To support eyes-free, mobile experiences, designers can minimize interaction with a device by leveraging the auditory channel. Whereas acoustic interfaces have proven to be effective in reducing visual attention, a perplexing challenge is designing aural information architectures for the web. To address this problem, techniques to remodel existing information architectures as linear, aural flows were introduced and evaluated. Mobile web browsing with aural flows is exemplified in ANFORA News, a semiaural mobile site designed to browse large collections of news stories. An exploratory study involving frequent news readers (n = 20) investigated the usability and navigation experience with ANFORA News in a mobile setting. Initial evidence suggests that aural flows are a promising paradigm to support eyes-free mobile navigation while on the go, but users still require assistance and additional learning to fully master the aural mechanics of the flows while on the go. Future work will improve on the mechanisms to customize content and control the aural navigation.

Sound, Aurality and Critical Listening: Disruptions at the Boundaries of Architecture

In this article, I briefly introduce the disciplines of soundscape studies, aural architecture and the notion of critical listening through creative examples from my own practice as a sound designer. Three sound installations, Acoustic Intersections (2006), Urban Ephemeral Room (2008) and Choreographies of Inhabitation (2009) present my modus operandi. These works aim to explore the boundaries between architecture and aural design by offering novel design methods that may assist in extending the manner in which the discipline of architecture is practiced, theorized and discussed. Finally, I offer a discussion on the disciplinary boundaries between soundscape studies, aural architecture and architecture, and how these boundaries may be destabilized and extended through an uptake of interdisciplinary practices and the notion of critical listening. The examination argues that the relationship between aural design and architecture is a symbiotic one.

Reconsidering Sound and the City: Asserting the Right to the Deaf-Friendly City

The sensory turn has made a pronounced attempt to broaden the focus in social and cultural geography to encompass the entire sensory spectrum, with the aim of counterbalancing what is perceived to have been the disproportionate attention granted to visual geographies and the act of seeing. In respect of critically understanding the geographies of difference that characterise Deaf citizens' experience in the contemporary city, this paper calls for a moment in geography to take stock of the signature that visual awareness bears in the social life of the Deaf city, and also to consider the hearingness implicit in geographical commentary on the role of sound in the reproduction of place. Reading urban and public spaces from a Deaf-centred perspective, I draw on parallel discussions from social geography and Deaf Studies to critically deconstruct the phenomena underpinning the aural bias that is deeply embedded in the social fabric, and which finds continuous expression in the intangible aural architectures of modern life. Dispositions and attitudes towards the ‘normal’ hearing body and towards hearing ontological engagements with sound and speech serve to maintain the city's audist and phonocentric inclinations. Here, the manner in which the right to the Deaf-friendly city is jeopardised is made explicit through empirical accounts from Deaf people in Ireland and England whose everyday geographies are characterised by the negotiation of urban spaces that were designed according to the needs of an assumed homogenous hearing public.

On the Relationship Between Inside and Outside: Conceptualising Acoustic Space in John Cage's Variations IV

This paper is an attempt to construct a spatial acoustic theory on the manner of operations within John Cage's 1963 musical composition titled Variations IV . In constructing such a theory I introduce Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter's notion of aural architecture , reflect on a number of details and references in Cage's score, and apply the visualisation methodology of semiotician A. J. Greimas. I also examine Cage's realisation directives as a system of emergence, primarily through the work's notation and its inherent spatial proclivities. In applying the semiotic square visualisation technique of Greimas I further derive the deep-level concepts of site , scale , landscape , and architecture , and discuss their relevance to the manner in which an emergent aural architecture is constructed by the work. A final diagram maps the listener experience of Variations IV as one predicated on the merging between interior and exterior acoustic spaces through the fluctuating interrelation between local and distant sound events and the architectural form.