BLDGBLOG: On Sound

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. And this is Geoff Manaugh

Geoff Manaugh:
My name is Geoff Manaugh. I’m an architecture writer and blogger based in Los Angeles.

Roman Mars:
And for seven years, he has written a website called “Building Blog.”

Geoff Manaugh:
Which is about architectural conjecture, urban speculation, and landscape futures. I’ve always liked the sounds of things and the acoustic nature of walking through the city or even the sense that when you’re walking down a hall that has rich, lush wall coverings, the right side can sound totally different from the left side. I’ve just always been interested in the sorts of acoustic aspects of architectural space. Most architects, if they design for sound, what they’re actually designing to do is design for silence. They’re designing to keep sound out of the environments. They’re designing to make sure that you don’t hear the street sounds that are happening outside. Or that you’re insulated from cars driving by or from the gravel plant up the road. So it’s really an architecture of silence that people tend to be designing for. But having said that, there was an interesting project a couple of years ago by an architect named Joel Sanders. It was basically an architectural design. Instead of standard glass windows, it would use parabolic microphones. Kind of like those things you see people holding on the sides of a football field during NFL games. These parabolic microphones would be pointed at the sky or they would be pointed out into the woods nearby or, you know, they would capture the sounds of airplanes flying overhead or birds in the forest or, for that matter, kids down the road. It very consciously and clearly brings acoustics into the architectural equation.

Geoff Manaugh:
There was an article in a British magazine called “The Wire.” It was an article about generative sound, so to speak. It referred to this idea of a “sound garden.”

[“Black Hole Sun” by Sound Garden]

Geoff Manaugh:
Rather than being the 1990’s grunge band, they were talking actually about the idea that you would deliberately plant certain species of flowering trees and that kind of thing in your back garden so that you could sort of time an acoustic event over the course of a year. There are certain species that when they bloom, the seed pod opens up with an audible pop.

[POP]

Geoff Manaugh:
It’s kind of the acoustic equivalent of the daisies coming up through the ground or the tulips blooming. There’s all kinds of other species that have particularly silky leaves that brush against each other in the breeze so you can fall asleep at night to the sound of this kind of really silken, silvery sort of tree-brushing sound. That’s one thing I think is really quite interesting, that you can actually deliberately build an acoustic ecosystem. You know, you could easily imagine that sort of thing added on to a kind of botanic garden so that you’d pay money to go, literally, listen to plant life.

Roman Mars:
Geoff Manaugh is also interested in archeo-acoustics. Good question.

Geoff Manaugh:
It’s basically the concern with, well, two things. Not only how would a building have sounded, or what would have been the acoustic effect of a certain building when that building was standing, but then also the sort of sound culture of a given civilization or village. Old Mayan temples were built not just as spectacular mountain-like constructions, but specifically as acoustic devices that would amplify not only the voice of the priest but also the sounds of things like the conch shells that would be played to do ritualistic music and that sort of thing.

[Echo-y conch shell sounds.]

Geoff Manaugh:
Their building was actually physically designed to be as echo-y as possible. The building themselves were like acoustic resonators or subwoofers, so to speak, that were deliberately made to help induce a kind of, almost like a psychedelic state in people. That’s archeo-acoustics. It’s like Indian Jones meets John Cage. I think architects are too willing to sort of let acoustics and sound be taken care of by sound designers or taken up by other people. And I think it really would be interesting to see them think more in terms of how to integrate their building into the soundscape of a city. There’s a lot of talk within architecture of how to build something that’s contextually specific and really responds to its site, but the “site is almost always, literally, a question of site. It’s an optical relationship to the city. It would really be interesting, actually, to think about architects going out to acoustically map the city block where their building is going to be and then figuring out a nice way to intervene in it and maybe reflect those sounds back at the neighborhood. Too much silence is no more interesting than too much noise.

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by Nick van der Kolk. I’m your host, Roman Mars. The program is supported by Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It’s a project of KALW, the American Institute of Architects San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design.

To find out more, including links to Geoff Manaugh’s ‘BLDGBLOG,’ which is essential reading, you should absolutely go there, and Nick van der Kolk’s ‘Love + Radio,’ which is a program he does for Vocalo.org and it’s stunning and brilliant and darkly fascinating, and Nick is one of the sonic innovators in the field. Absolutely the best. I was going to include an excerpt, actually at the end of this program but man, that program is for adults. I have 8th-grade kids who listen to this. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. Oh, man. Anyway, you should absolutely check it out if you’re an adult. You’ll love it. It’s at loveandradio.org, and you’ll find a link to that at 99percentinvisible.org.