Acoustic Intimacy - Reflection of Literature

Catherine Kambouris
Oct 25, 2015
4 min read

Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, whereas sound is omni-dimensional. The sense of sight implies exteriority, but sound creates an experience of interiority. I regard an object, but sound approaches me; the eye reaches, but the ear receives. Buildings do not react to our gaze, but they do return our sounds back to our ears. ‘The centring action of sound affects man’s sense of cosmos,’ writes Walter Org. ‘For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its centre. Man is the ’umbilicus mundi,’ the navel of the world.” It is thought-provoking that the mental loss of the sense of centre in the contemporary world could be attributed, at least in part, to the disappearance of the integrity of the audible world.

Hearing structures articulates the experience and understanding of space. We are not normally aware of the significance of hearing in spatial experience, although sound often provides the temporal continuum in which visual impressions are embedded. When the soundtrack is removed from a film, for instance, the scene loses its plasticity and sense of continuity and life. Silent film, indeed, had to compensate for the lack of sound by a demonstrative matter of overacting.

Adrian Stokes, the English painter and essayist, makes perceptive observations about the interaction of space and sound, sound ad stone. ‘Like mothers of me, the buildings are good listeners, distinct or seemingly in bundles, appease the orifices of palaces that lean back gradually from canal or pavement. A long sound with its eco brings consummation to the stone,’ he writes.

Anyone who has half woken up to the sound of a train or ambulance in a nocturnal city, and through his/her sleep experienced the space of the city with its countless inhabitants scattered within its structures, knows the power of sound over the imagination; the nocturnal sound is a reminder of human solitude and mortality, and it makes one conscious of the entire slumbering city. Anyone who has become entranced by the sound of dripping water into the darkness of a ruin can attest to the extraordinary capacity of the ear to carve a volume into the void of darkness. The space traced by the ear in the darkness becomes a cavity sculptured directly in the interior of the mind.

The last chapter of Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s seminal book ‘Experiencing Architecture’ is significantly entitled ‘Hearing Architecture.’ The writer describes various dimensions of acoustical qualities, and recalls the acoustic percept of the underground tunnels in Vienna in Orson Welles’s film ‘The Third Man,’ “Your ear receives the impact of both the length and the cylindrical form of the tunnel.”

One can also recall the acoustic harshness of an uninhabited and unfurnished house as compared with the affability of a lived-in home, in which sound is refracted and softened by the numerous surfaces of objects of personal life. Every building or space has its characteristic sounds of intimacy or monumentally, invitation or rejection, hospitality or hostility. A space in understood and appreciated through its echo as much as through its visual shape, but the acoustic percept usually remains as an unconscious background experience.

Sight is the sense of the solitary observer, whereas hearing creates a sense of connection and solidarity; our look wonders lonesomely in the dark depths of a cathedral, but the sound of the organ makes us immediately experience our affinity with the space. We stare alone at the suspense of a circus, but the burst of applause after the relaxation of suspense reunites us with the world. The sound of church bells echoing through the streets of a town makes us aware of our citizenship. The sound of church bells echoing through the street of a town makes us aware of our citizenship. The echo of steps on a paved street has an emotional charge because the sound reverberating from the surrounding walls puts us in direct interaction with space; the sound measures space and makes its scale comprehensible. We stroke the boundaries of the space with our ears. The cries of seagulls in the harbour awaken an awareness of the vastness of the ocean and the infinities of the horizon.

Every city has its echo which depends on the pattern and scale of its streets and the prevailing architectural styles and materials. The echo of a Renaissance city differs from that of a Baroque city. But our cities have lost their echo altogether. The wide, open spaces of contemporary streets do not turn sound, and in the interiors of today’s buildings echoes are absorbed and censored. The programmed recorded music of shopping malls and public spaces eliminates the possibility of grasping the acoustic volume of space. Our ears have been blinded.

Juhani Pallasmaa

Pallasmaa, J. (2010). The thinking hand. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley, pp. 53-55