Although, in modern times, spatial acoustics have replaced animating spirits in describing the aural personality of a space, nevertheless, I prefer to believe that, however subliminally, some sense of spirits animating spaces resides within us even now” (my italics). In ancient cultures, objects were animate, containing living spirits. Blesser and Salter state, “…archaeologists speculate that ancient shamans heard cave acoustics as the voice of a cave’s spirit. Of particular interest is Blesser and Salter’s connecting of acoustic principles with pantheistic speculation (see for a discussion on pantheism). A number of practitioners are referred to in this paper whose writings have stimulated an imaginative response from the author in a practice that seeks to transform architectural soundscapes through the use of electroacoustic sound installations. This paper presents a soundscape design methodology that has emerged from the author’s practice, which combines applied public sound-installations, spatial poetics and sonic theory. This paper describes two soundscape designs, Revoicing the Striated Soundscape and Subterranean Voices, which transformed existing architectural soundscapes for the emergence of Voices in a laneway and a building located in the City of Melbourne, Australia. Sonic architectures are created with electroacoustic sound installations that recompose existing architectural soundscapes, to create the conditions for the emergence of the Voices of buildings. This argument is achieved by building on the speculation through the discussion of a soundscape design methodology that considers space as containing pantheistic qualities. The paper argues that Blesser and Salter expand such discussion into pantheistic speculation when suggesting that humanity contains the imaginative capacity to experience spaces as “living spirits”. Does a building contain its own Voice? And if so, can that Voice be discovered, transformed and augmented by soundscape design? Barry Blesser’s writings on acoustic space, discuss reverberation and resonant frequencies as providing architectural spaces with characteristic listening conditions related to the architectural space’s dimensions and materiality.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |