Archives for October 2018

When I was in the fourth grade, I put in my headphones and I never took them out again. Since that day, I have been addicted to my private music. Whether I was going shopping with my mom, on a car ride to a friend’s house or I had five minutes between classes, there was one constant: I was listening to music. I valued this greatly, being able to tune out everything going on around me made the world easier to deal with: I do not like the public sounds, I often feel a sensory overload and become extremely anxious when I am surrounded by a lot of voices, or other noises. This environment, however, is different than the one I left at home, it is not as loud, not as overwhelming and, because I have been inspired by the conversations we have had in class, I have allowed myself to try to experience the world without my headphones. As someone who had eight to nine years separate from the world of public noises, I find that everything sounds new to me. While anyone who hears these sounds day by day would not be able to notice any particular details as they would become desensitized to the sounds they hear constantly–my experience is totally different. I can hear every detail, I can hear wind, I can hear bugs, I can hear birds–I can hear different types of birds–and it all sounds new to me. Surprisingly enough, I have found that I enjoy some of the world’s more organic sounds just as much as I enjoy my music–for example, I like the sound of the crunching of dead leaves so much that I now go out of my way to step on them. Even though I don’t see me separating myself from my music, it is nice to experience these organic sounds as well.

Blesser, Salter, and Rath all in their own  unique way focus on the Importance of sound and how it directly ties into spaces. Byrne however, also focused on sound in spaces but he did so in musical sense. Rath started off by discussing European Church Acoustics, and how high ceilings made out of hard sound reflecting materials. In those churches the priest would stand within the chancel and face away from the churchgoers. This would cause the churchgoers to hear an echo or reverberations something that all four of the the theorist discussed in some fashion.  Blesser and Salter also focus on sound and space  related to religious spaces, but in terms of strengthening the relationship betweeen believers and their beliefs. “The religious structure of Ancient Greece, like the Aeolian harp, also made connections between earth and heaven” (188). These spaces were not only made for sound but the sounds that they weee made for also had a purpose. That purpose was to connect those within that space to nontangible places. Byrne’s focus was more on spaces and how music fit into them. He also looked at his focus from a perspective that changed overtime from rock music in small spaces to traditional African music out in the open.

Byrne, Rath and Blesser and Salter all discuss how sound and spaces interact. They look at how the sounds are impacted by the space in which they are produced; Rath explains this relationship using the term “‘catacoustics,’ the study of how sound was instrumentally projected, reflected, dissipated, and otherwise manipulated once it had been produced” (Rath). While they all agree that the space affects the sound and how one hears the sound, they disagree on if the sound or the space comes first. Byrne, in his TEDTalk says, the “vessel is created first” therefore, the sound, in his example, music, is made for the ‘vessel’ in which it is being performed. He explains how birds adapt their calls depending on the space which they are living in, and he uses this as a comparison to humans. He says, “the passion, the joy is not mutually exclusive, what the world needs now is for us to realize that we are like the birds. we adapt, we sing, like the bird, the joy is still there even though we have changed what we do to fit the context” (Byrne). For years, artist, from Bach to pop musicians today, adapt to and play for the place in which they perform their music. However, Rath and Blesser and Salter think that spaces adapt for the sound. Blesser and Salter discuss the Great Ball Court, which was a large gathering area place surrounded by large stone walls, was considered perfect for a religious leader to preach because his voice was louder, giving him “higher stature and perceived power” (Blesser and Salter). It was said that, “whispers at one end can be heard at the other end, making it an ideal place for a ceremonial leader to guide the audience” (Blesser and Salter). Rath talks about how spaces where changed to fit the sound, draping curtains to dampen echo and change the space’s catacoustics. Rath explain how “The Reformation changed the acoustics of existing churches. Graven sounds as well as graven images had to be removed. Clarity of voice rather than fullness became the goal” (Rath). Byrne, Rath and Blesser and Salter highlight different approaches to how sound and space interreact, giving each the reader gaps allowing one to figure out how they think about and interact with space and sound around them. 

Sound is something often disregarded in today’s time and architecture, but it was one of the main motivations behind specific architecture in many churches and places of worship. Rath, Blesser and Salter all agree on this premise, that spaces in churches were often created specifically for a sound purpose. Both Byrne and Rath give details of the intentions of acoustic spaces crafted with a purpose for a certain sound, whether that be a Quaker meeting room with “no corner for the devil to hide” or Carnegie Hall, built for a specific auditory purpose. Rath diverges and speaks of the “emphasis on noise rather than sound”, meaning that “articulation was not as important as volume” in terms of the congregants of the church. This idea is interesting in its application, and shows the power that sound had and still has in a religious setting. In his TED Talk, Byrne focuses more on the musical elements of the spaces rather than the pure sounds of a space, like Blesser and Salter’s focus on the possibly religious sounds of the stairs at Chichen Izta. The ideas come back together with the speak of reverberations, something all four thinkers think are important — Blesser, Salter and Rath all speak in specifics of amount of time per reverberations in specific buildings, and Byrne discusses the different types of music that were suited for a specific type of music with certain lengths of notes and rhythms. Byrne complements Blesser, Salter and Rath by bringing their fairly religious-centered ideas into a more modern application, where it’s easy to see the impacts of these acoustic places in many types of music. Without a doubt, all of the thinkers cause the reader to think more carefully about the intent of the building that they’re in, as well as the idea that buildings are often more than just buildings.

Byrne, Rath, and Blesser & Slater focus their work on the spaces where sound, and more specifically music, fill. At the end of his Ted Talk, David Byrne says, “we have changed what we do to fit the context.” Byrne discusses the changing atmospheres of music halls over the last few centuries, spanning from gothic cathedrals to today’s massive concert halls including Disney. He says that the original purpose of the concert hall was a musical one: “the room flatters the music, it actually improves it.” Classical musicians varied their intricacy in music based on how intricate their spaced allowed them to be. This idea of the artist adapting their music to the space it will be performed in is backed up by Blesser & Slater in their piece “Ancient Acoustic Spaces.” They say of the design of classical music spaces, “An architect designs a structure or a space for its visual or utilitarian properties, while being generally oblivious to its acoustic attributes or aural personality.” Architects in ancient times, according to Blesser & Salter, did not take into account the function of their creations in the designing phase of their process; they only accounted for the visual aspects of the building. Rath, on the other hand, contradicts this point in his section “Chesapeake Churches and Chapels.” Here, Rath emphasizes the idea of “listening rather than seeing.” He says that “the primacy of listening over seeing was reflected in seating.” Seats often had obstructed views of the altar and reading desk because the acoustics were so much more important to the service. Within this single theme of spaces in music, we see completely different perspectives in the original purpose of each space. There seems to be a significant discrepancy over the viewpoint of importance of the aesthetic and calculated aspects of the buildings.

Byrne relates to the ideas that Rath expresses in “No Corner for the Devil to Hide” because they both recognize the role played by the space that the sound is produced in. They know that the same sound can have a completely different sound if produced in another room or building. However, Byrne uses the building as a source of sound whereas Rath simply uses the building for its acoustic effects on the sound produced by another source, such as his clap or the voice of a priest in a European Church. The relationship between architecture, acoustics, and sound is an idea that one does not think of often, but after reading both of these sources I began to realize that sounds are heard differently in my daily life based on the room, such as music in the shower/bathroom versus the same song played on the same device outside. Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter support Byrne’s ideas of acoustics in their piece “Ancient Acoustics Spaces”, and even trace these ideas as far back as 1500 BC, when the Mayans perfected the acoustics of The Great Ball Court. Upon further examination, it is evident that these principles are common in several other ancient civilizations. The idea of a space transforming how one hears a sound is hard to grasp at first, but these societies knew this to be true long before technology could prove it. Sound waves bounce off of structures, walls, and objects in a space before reaching the ears of a listener, which makes each sound unique when played/produced in a unique space.

When listening to David Byrne’s “Playing the Building”, we can hear sounds that are from the specific building that Byrne’s is in. He makes the sounds unique because of if he were to redo everything he did inside another building, different sounds would be made. It changes because of the different infrastructure inside the building. When looking at Rath, we can see a difference between Byrne and Rath, Rath believes that soundscapes are made depending on culture and religion. Rath gave an example of the European Church, and how the chancel was constructed specifically to make the priest face away from the congregation. Rath said that because of this the priest’s “voice never carried directly to the listeners in the nave. It began its trip toward them as an echo.”(131) Rath also gave an example of the Chesapeake Anglicans, and their Jamestown Chapel, the structure of the church is different compared to the European Church because “where one [person] was seated was an indicator of social standing. Those in the front heard more of the direct signal. Those in the back heard less of it, and thus more reverberation” (135). Raths theory of how there is a connection between sounds and religion and these ideas can connect to Blesser and Salter’s idea of earcons. Blesser and Salter wrote about how the Mayans had excellent “auditory spatial awareness.”(189) People have heard howling and whistling from the wind when they were at the Mayan ruins. This means that every structure has a deliberate purpose when it comes to the sound it makes.

In David Byrne’s “Playing the Building”, the sound produced is very specific to that individual building. If he set up the same strings and techniques in another building, due to difference in architecture, the same sounds could not be reproduced. This idea of sound being specific to certain spaces is similar to Rath’s idea about sound in churches. However, Rath differs a little bit from Byrne as he goes on to make the claim that depending on the culture/religion, certain soundscapes can be made. He writes about how in the European church, the medieval chancel is constructed so the priest was “facing away from the congregation, [his] voice never carried directly to the listeners in the nave. It began its trip toward them as an echo, reflected several more times before reaching any ears” (131). Different from the European church, for the Chesapeake Anglicans, in their Jamestown Chapel, “sounds were projected along the length rather than the breadth of the chapel. Where one was seated was an indicator of social standing. Those in the front heard more of the direct signal. Those in the back heard less of it, and thus more reverberation” (135). For each of these different peoples, their religious structures were built differently according to their separate cultures, religions, and religious beliefs. This idea of sounds being unique to spaces and being deliberately made for the separate religious buildings can connect to Blesser and Salter’s idea of earcons in “Ancient Acoustic Spaces”. An earcon is defined as “a sonic event that contains special symbolic meaning not present in the sound wave” (187). Looking at the deliberate creation of spaces for sounds can show us greater meaning of the sound itself. Blesser and Salter wrote that “the Mayans has a heightened auditory spatial awareness”. This was evident to many people at a Mayan ruin, including a visitor who observed “distinct howls and whistles from stone structures when wind arrived from a particular direction, as if it were giving early warning of imminent storms and hurricanes” (189). This shows that there are deliberate actions of building certain spaces to make meaningful sounds. The idea of sound being unique to spaces created by Byrne and enforced by Rath and Blesser and Salter also leads me to continue to explore the question of if a soundscape is a place you go versus a thing you make.