Barry Blesser, Linda-Ruth Salter: Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture (2007)

We experience spaces not only by seeing but also by listening. We can navigate a room in the dark, and “hear” the emptiness of a house without furniture. Our experience of music in a concert hall depends on whether we sit in the front row or under the balcony. The unique acoustics of religious spaces acquire symbolic meaning. Social relationships are strongly influenced by the way that space changes sound. In Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter examine auditory spatial awareness: experiencing space by attentive listening. Every environment has an aural architecture.

The audible attributes of physical space have always contributed to the fabric of human culture, as demonstrated by prehistoric multimedia cave paintings, classical Greek open-air theaters, Gothic cathedrals, acoustic geography of French villages, modern music reproduction, and virtual spaces in home theaters. Auditory spatial awareness is a prism that reveals a culture’s attitudes toward hearing and space. Some listeners can learn to “see” objects with their ears, but even without training, we can all hear spatial geometry such as an open door or low ceiling.

Integrating contributions from a wide range of disciplines—including architecture, music, acoustics, evolution, anthropology, cognitive psychology, audio engineering, and many others—Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? establishes the concepts and language of aural architecture. These concepts provide an interdisciplinary guide for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of how space enhances our well-being. Aural architecture is not the exclusive domain of specialists. Accidentally or intentionally, we all function as aural architects.

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
ISBN 0262026058, 9780262026055
437 pages

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Simon Emmerson (ed.): Music, Electronic Media, and Culture (2000)

Technology revolutionised the ways that music was produced in the twentieth century. As that century drew to a close and a new century begins a new revolution in roles is underway. The separate categories of composer, performer, distributor and listener are being challenged, while the sounds of the world itself become available for musical use. All kinds of sounds are now brought into the remit of composition, enabling the music of others to be sampled (or plundered), including that of unwitting musicians from non-western cultures. This sound world may appear contradictory – stimulating and invigorating as well as exploitative and destructive. This book addresses some of the issues now posed by the brave new world of music produced with technology.

Contents: Introduction, Simon Emmerson; Part One: Listening and interpreting: Through and around the acousmatic: the interpretation of electroacoustic sounds, Luke Windsor; Simulation and reality: the new sonic objects, Ambrose Field; Beyond the acousmatic: hybrid tendencies in electroacoustic music, Simon Waters; Part Two: Cultural noise: Plunderphonics, Chris Cutler; Crossing cultural boundaries through technology?, Simon Emmerson; Cacophony, Robert Worby; Part Three: New places, spaces and narratives: Art on air: a proile of new radio art, Kersten Glandien; ‘Losing touch’? the human performer and electronics, Simon Emmerson; Stepping outside for a moment: narrative space in two works for sound alone, Katharine Norman; Index.

Publisher Ashgate, 2000
ISBN 0754601099, 9780754601098
252 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)

Emily Thompson: The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (2002)

“In this history of aural culture in early-twentieth-century America, Emily Thompson charts dramatic transformations in what people heard and how they listened. What they heard was a new kind of sound that was the product of modern technology. They listened as newly critical consumers of aural commodities. By examining the technologies that produced this sound, as well as the culture that enthusiastically consumed it, Thompson recovers a lost dimension of the Machine Age and deepens our understanding of the experience of change that characterized the era.

Reverberation equations, sound meters, microphones, and acoustical tiles were deployed in places as varied as Boston’s Symphony Hall, New York’s office skyscrapers, and the soundstages of Hollywood. The control provided by these technologies, however, was applied in ways that denied the particularity of place, and the diverse spaces of modern America began to sound alike as a universal new sound predominated. Although this sound—clear, direct, efficient, and nonreverberant—had little to say about the physical spaces in which it was produced, it speaks volumes about the culture that created it. By listening to it, Thompson constructs a compelling new account of the experience of modernity in America.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2002
ISBN 0262201380, 9780262201384
510 pages

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