Sonic Architecture
Kersten Glandien: The 4th Dimension: Sound Art’s Relation to Architecture
Keynote presentation at the annual conference of the AG Auditive Media Cultures of the Society for Media Studies on the Topic ‘Sonic Architectures’
Location
University of Arts, Bern, Switzerland
Date & time
7–9 September 2023
Synopsis
Away from sterile gallery cubes and front-facing concert halls, sound artists have always looked for locations in which sound unfolds differently, in which they can experiment with local resonances, spatial frequencies, sound reflections and reverberation times. Adding sound as a discernible temporal dimension to architectural space, sound artists engineer slow multisensory spatial experiences. This presentation reflects on spatial behaviour conditioned by electronic connectivity, compressed screen space and data-augmented reality and examines groundbreaking sound art works that facilitate, by contrast, expansive sound-led experiences in diverse architectural locations – indoors and out.
A short version of the presentation will be published in German in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 2024.
Conference Brief
Sound architectures form the foundation of musical listening and auditory (media) cultures. In a sonic inflection of the Spatial Turn, which brought space into focus as a (new) object of analysis in cultural studies in the late 1980s, the Sonic Architectures conference is dedicated to interdisciplinary contexts – from the architectural, technical and acoustic design of sound spaces on the one hand to musical sound architectures on the other. Space as a central parameter of contemporary composition fundamentally changes not least the concept of sound space itself.
