Joseph L. Clarke - Echos Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space

UNTIL RELATIVELY RECENTLY, THE MOST SOPHISTICATED SONIC MEDIA were buildings. The acoustic properties of a building can facilitate or frustrate the activity it houses, whether conversation, artistic performance, or ritual. A room may seem monumental or intimate depending on its level of reverberation. Architecture often contains secret places where sounds echo or voices carry in surprising ways. All these acoustic conditions can have political consequences, determining whose words are heard and by whom. Sound matters not just in specialized buildings such as auditoria and concert halls but in almost every kind of structure. Yet the discourse of architecture often struggles to engage critically with the sonic life of buildings. Presented in arid scientific terms, acoustics can seem peripheral to the disciplines core concerns.

This book offers an architectural history of architectural acoustics, positioning it as a central problem for the field. It also argues that the elaboration of architectural acoustics helped provide modern culture with words, representational conventions, and intellectual frameworks for conceiving sound spatially. After all, sound takes place. To hear a sound is, with few exceptions, to perceive its arrival from somewhere. While humans ability to recognize locational cues in sound is a biological faculty based in the auditory cortex, how one interprets these cues is culturally determinedbound up with social and linguistic practices, habits of mind and body, sensoryhierarchies, artistic forms, communication technologies, even religious commitments. It is connected in especially significant ways with architecture.

In recent years, the most important social and cultural accounts of sound in the physical environment have drawn on the idea of acoustic space. This locution and related terms such as soundscape have appeared more and more frequently in writing about architecture, not to mention scholarship in media and communication studies, musicology, literary studies, anthropology, and art history. Yet acoustic space elides several distinct meanings. It is sometimes posited as inherent in the physical makeup of a building, as when architectural historians judge a Venetian church to be an unpromising acoustic space because its walls reflect an extreme amount of sound, garbling the singing. Others take acoustic space to be a figment of the human perceptual apparatus, a mental map of ones surroundings constructed on the basis of what one hears, as when a writer describes how he gradually became attuned to acoustic space after going blind, or when a media scholar argues that nineteenth-century sound technologies prompted a reconstruction of the shape of acoustic space. For still others, acoustic space is better understood as a kind of social infrastructure, a collective framework for interacting with other members of a group through the making and hearing of sound: this is the intended meaning when an ethnomusicologist writes that the medium of radio provides its dispersed audience with a shared acoustic space.