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.
