The immersive guitar project: Imagining possibilities for enriching audience experience through architectural innovation (original) (raw)
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Music in Architecture: Lest we Forget
We engage with a place in a multitude of ways, through all of the senses. We are all an extension of place, but in modern societies the visual often typifies our sense of belonging to place at the expense of other senses. The architecture of our surroundings, for example, is predominantly described in visual terms. Art and architecture are often conflated. Art in architecture is often reduced to the visual, and the integration with or application to the built form. Yet architecture gives an acoustic quality of material and space that is inseparable from the experience. Commonly, we are more touched by what we hear than what we see. How, then, do we know our musical selves through architecture? This paper discusses one way of knowing through “The Piano Mill Project”, a hybrid building and musical instrument, designed and purpose-built to house sixteen reclaimed pianos – vestiges of colonialism, post-colonialism, artistic hierarchies, and new beginnings.
Music Through Architecture: Towards an Expanded Practice
2016
This research is an inquiry into how architecture can inform, or contribute to the practice of composition. As an architect and composer, I try to find strategies for musical composition in architectural practice and thought, by reframing and confronting concepts and methodologies from both disciplines. My research aims at an expanded practice (and analysis) of musical creation, one that transverses different conceptions of space—from the score based pitch space to the social and political spaces of music’s production, performance and reception. This practice based PhD research consists of a portfolio of nine works that were developed in a dialectical relation to these ideas. The works are presented in a framework composed of five conceptual tools used to articulate music and architecture. These are Material, Site, Drawing, Programme and Use. With the notion of Material, I explore how the acoustic behaviour of a performance space, or of a 'performative device' affects the musical work. Architectural materials become musical ones as they are implicated in the listening experience. The discussion about Site brings to music the notions of place, the local, and everyday life, embracing soundscapes so many times excluded from musical discourse. Musical sites are also architectural sites, always related to their present environment, and their everyday contingencies. Drawing is a tool for developing ideas, for thinking (the sketch), but also the main mediator between architect and builder, or composer and performer (notation). When considered in a broad frame of possibilities, from symbolic to graphic systems, it helps to redefine the roles and ultimately to rede9ine the work itself. Programme exposes the constraints and conditions of the creation process, while also revealing the socio-political relations between musicians and audiences, institutions and composers, composers and performers. Programming as framing can be a platform to expand what the work concerns. Through a consideration of Use, the work becomes dispersed in a plurality of agents that converge in a useful event. Thus composition, as architecture, moves from being about conditioning design to designing conditions where musical events may happen.
Music and architecture: from digital composition to physical artifact
This paper addresses how relationships between music and architecture can be explored within the design studio through a series of digital games and projects and culminating in the actual construction of small-scale architecture. Through the examination of music and architecture, students are provided with valuable opportunities for authentic learning opportunities relating to digital mastery, teamwork, tectonics, the role of digital technologies in the design and construction process and the translation of an architectural concept relating to composition to a physical artifact.
2014
Music and Architecture is an ongoing workshop series organised by Theatrum Mundi, a professional network of academics, architects, planners, performing and visual artists, hosted by LSE Cities. The aim is to bring together a diverse group of practitioners to discuss in small and informal groups, the relationship between physical space and musical space. The first workshops were divided into four parts: Harmony, Rhythm, Melody and Narrative, and Porosity. The topic arose from Theatrum Mundi founder, Richard Sennett. Perspective, distance, height, balance, proportion, weight, density, light, colour and mass are fundamental elements within our experiences of both music and architecture. For architecture to come into existence, boundaries of physical space must be defined and for music, boundaries within our experience of time need be defined. So can an architect who sculpts and shapes physical space, learn from a musician who creates virtual environments of musical space? The four contributions in this publication represent the breadth of conversation that arose from bringing together a multidisciplinary group. It’s interesting that despite vast gaps between genre, profession and experience, a core thread links each contribution – the notion of an unfinished, non-fixed or open space, whether that be in the design of porosity and presence in musical venues as in Richard Sennett’s contribution or in challenging our experience of listening to recorded material in the contribution from Lexxx Dromgoole and Gwilym Gold. The title of this publication takes its name from architect Andrew Todd, an active member of Theatrum Mundi. It reflects the contributions from both Ronan O’Hora, how do we really hear what’s around us, and Laura Marcus – might we come to ‘listen’ to a house, street or town as an audience does to a symphony.
The Interplay of Music and Architecture: Layering of Sound and Space
A person can see, feel and touch architecture, but what if he / she could hear it too? Imagine an architectural music in which the surfaces, materials, and forms of a space speak directly, alluring the observer even further into affirmation of spaciousness around them, invoking different memories and emotions. Innovative architects and designers across the world are finding inspiration in music to create sound-producing structures. This new composite living sound organisms, inspired by music, aim to heighten our senses and open our minds to the finer details that make up the world around us. As they come active, or alive they reveal their own tones. Now through digital expression / digital technologies, architecture can attain new heights of creative supremacy. The aim of this paper is to explore through an interdisciplinary thinking, connections between aural and architectural / musical and spatial, in order to achieve a better understanding of how space enhances our well-being. The question that arises is, how sound / music influences the atmosphere of space, while in the same time showing that every environment has an aural architecture.
Architecture as Music: Björk Example
Journal of Strategic Research in Social Science (JoSReSS), 2019
The art of music has been practiced in specific music buildings since the 19th century. These buildings aimed at the best acoustic experience of music. With its visual contribution, space plays a role in a holistic music experience. Today, the art of music has begun to interact with different disciplines with the developing technology, which has led to the emergence of new forms of expression and this has been reflected in the music spaces. The spaces are designed to reflect the sound in different ways and elements shaped with sound have been added to the architecture. In addition to the fact that the space becomes a part of the music, sculptures that change with music are included in the performance and the two disciplines can be integrated in different ways. In this context, the relationship between architecture and music in the spatial dimension is examined in conjunction with Björk's Cornucopia performance inspired by the sound-space work Tvisöngür designed by artist Lukas Kühne. Kühne's concrete sound-space work is a tribute to Iceland's traditional five-tone harmony. The idea of space with its own resonance brings the relationship between music and space to a different dimension. In this study, the relationship between music and space is discussed through the performance of Björk in a sound space.
Music + Architecture: A Selected Bibliography
This bibliography presents selected sources (mostly in English) in the field of music and architecture, a topic for which a growing number of anthologies and journal articles have appeared in the past two decades. Many of the sources approach the relationship between the practices through multiple case studies. Several books focused on particular artists in both disciplines have been included not because those artists are central to the study of music and architecture, but because those are the most informative examples of such books currently in publication. There exists a body of theoretical literature dealing with the spatial dimension of music in the abstract, with methods of translating music into architecture, and with the acoustics of architecture; only works addressing aspects of cultural studies have been included from that literature. Throughout the bibliography, works of particular interest from a musical and cultural perspective have been marked with an asterisk.
Architecture as Music: A personal journey through time and space
My journey started in the City of London, where I found a building, the Cheesegrater, that generated harmony, pattern, discord, repetition and silence. It inspired me to produce a piece of Visual Music, Citirama, expressing the relationship between architecture and music. The success of the piece during presentations and performances has now led me to formulate a considered view on how music and architecture can be found to coexist: how our new understanding of the concept of space/time can bring an art form concerned primarily in mapping sound in time closer to a form focused on what we experience in moving through space. From the Cheesegrater, my wanderings led me to a building, in Berlin, where the emotions of music have been conveyed in purely architectural terms and to another structure, in Brussels, which, during its short life, offered a total architectural/musical experience in time and space. I conclude that, over the centuries, Western developments in architecture and music have tended to obscure their common roots in Ancient Greece. Although Pythagorean mathematical links still persist, its through our new 21 st century awareness of how the human brain causes us to see and hear that, once again, architecture and music will be able to sing in unison.
Appropriating an architectural design tool for musical ends
Digital Creativity, 2012
NURBS (non-uniform rational b-spline) modelling has become a ubiquitous tool within architectural design praxis. In this article I examine three projects that utilise NURBS modelling as a means for which a musical system’s inherent spatiality is visualised. There are numerous precedents for which architectural form is a derivation of a musical system, or a musical system is proportionally informed by architectonic gesture. I propose in this article three NURBS modelling methodologies: for the spatial analysis of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s sound projection geometries in "Pole für 2"; for a spatial realisation of John Cage’s indeterminate work "Variations III"; and for the generation of a surface manifold informed by musically derived soundscape data from the Japanese garden Kyu Furukawa Teien. Rather than seeking to translate music into inhabitable architecture, or architectonic form into music, I highlight an approach that produces an interstitial territory between discourses on architecture and music analysis.