Soundscapes

When you are listening carefully with your eyes closed, in a church, or a forest, you engage in attentive listening. Taking a moment to visualize the world from its sounds, a complete environment begins to form, rich in emotion, memories and spatial dynamics. We feel included in an auditory equivalent of a landscape. Soundscapes are like terrains of sonic events. Landscape, when viewed in this way, as a series of sonic events in space, becomes less static and full of architectural possibility.

This research explores how sound can manifest in architecture through its dynamic, sonic complexity. In doing so, it attempts to shift architecture from a privileging of the visual, to one where spatialized sound has a direct influence on architecture and how it is drawn. To research this proposition, the relationship between sound and architecture will be tested at three different scales: a sound installation, a domestic building, and large-scale. These tests are part of a design research methodology that begins with conceptual exploration, and progressively engages with greater degrees of programmatic and architectural complexity. The installation explores how the body engages with sound and space; the domestic scale project tests how a small-scale building can inhabit a sonic and real landscape; the large-scale design extends the results of these design tests through a resolved architectural project, situated in a physical and sonic landscape. This body of work will then inform three sonic architectures in which architecture allows sound to shape space and experience, seeking to understand architectures that are beyond the realm of the visual.