1. Introduction
When time is introduced into space, sound infiltrates, thus provoking an alternative understanding of spatiality. This conception engages the dynamism of their relationships, which are agitated through movement and vibration, which destabilises matter as a static object. Space is conditioned by movement, a relational dynamic between the matter that defines the space, contains the space, and frequents the space to which it intervenes and receives. When matter is affected by sound, a new perspective of space appears: the sound space (Balbontín Reference Balbontín2022). The sound space is the sonic dimension of space where both elements are intertwined and coexist, defining each other in a joint process of self-creation.
The sound space is not confined to a singular definition, rather it serves as a conceptual territory encompassing theoretical discourses and sonic practices, bringing into conversation these two essential elements: the sound and the space. The notion of sound space uses sound as a medium to express a spatial situation, whether it is a real, composed, designed or imagined space. Explored through either theoretical analysis or artistic expression, sound space embodies a transdisciplinary approach, drawing upon the realms of music, art and architecture. These disciplines come together to examine the sound space through various lenses, encompassing sonorous, acoustic and auditory perspectives. This multidimensional exploration broadens the scope of enquiry, ranging from materialistic considerations to phenomenological manifestations, enabling the construction of a relational network centred around the concept of sound space.
The present article attempts to discuss the conceptual and sensory confrontation between sound and space, its relations and interactions, understanding both elements as a whole, as a new symbiotic element and also as separate entities, yet still interconnected. The objective is to recognise how the sound space is produced by the social force of cultural arrangements, regarding the historical and contemporary appreciations. In this process, we have engaged with different perspectives on the subject of study, bringing together a group of architects, sound engineers, artists and researchers – all of them dedicated to sound – to discuss the sensitive experience of listening to architecture, within material or dematerialised realities. In order to reach their auditory practices, we conducted a series of interviews. These interviews aim to create a rhizomatic map of experiences, artworks and conceptualisations, thus presenting a territory of ideas around the notion of sound space. Here we use the concept of rhizome proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi2005) for the organisation of a multiplicity of ideas without central points, but with multiple entries, connections and lateral movements, allowing for a non-linear and non-hierarchical network of relations.
The choice of the interviewees was made based on the proximity of their practices and research within the subject of study, considering in turn, to gather a varied and heterogeneous group of people in respect to their specific approach to sound space, which can be embraced from a more theoretical or artistic conception, from a material or phenomenological aspect, and from a physical or sensory approximation. The interviewees are Ricardo Atienza,Footnote 1 Brandon LaBelle,Footnote 2 Bernhard Leitner,Footnote 3 Daniel Neumann,Footnote 4 Francesc Daumal,Footnote 5 Anna BofillFootnote 6 and Pablo Elinbaum.Footnote 7
These interviews took place over a period of four years from 2019 to 2022. All interviews were based in a semi-structured script that could trigger a more flexible conversation around the subject of sound and space grounded in each specific personal practice. To develop this article, we selected only one common question and the transcriptions have been edited for a fluid reading. They are structured in the article, one after the other, for a quick comparison of approaches, practices and thoughts. Following up, a condensation of the concept relating the interviewees’ perspectives with other authors on the subject was created, therefore putting together a conceptual puzzle for building a compelling retrospective around the rhizomatic genealogy of the notion of sound space.
2. Interviews
Interview question
We recognise the interaction of sound and space in your work, where these two elements collaboratively construct the binomial concept of sound space. This concept is not strictly defined as only one thing, and may have various interpretations. We would like to understand what this concept means to you and how your work incorporates it.
Ricardo Atienza
Actually, this concept is something that has occupied me for many years intermittently. It started with the reading of a classic book by Bayer, about the espaçe sonore. In this book, he raises the question of what is sound space. He explores whether sound space, for example, is a musical work, or if sound space would be the score? The score as a space in itself, with codes, or is it the mental space of the composer? Or is it the space of the representation, or is the space perceived during the performance? The sound space is many things; it is a concept that encompasses a whole series of different layers.
There is no sound without space. For me, to say sound space is like saying sound. Even the sound of the anechoic chamber has a space, and the imagined sound is located in a space, in a context, even if it is mental. Sound is space; therefore, space is sound by default. It is a binomial that cannot be broken. When I talk about sound space, I’m talking about a situated experience. Sound places the listener within a specific context. From this context, and with the scale that your body is giving and the position that your body adopts, you are also giving a scale to the listening, you are situating that listening. Sound space will always be situated listening. This has a lot to do with some shortcomings of architecture, which is very graphic, very visual, it is an external conception of space, so you observe it from the outside. However, when you think of a sound space, you have to experience it from the inside; sound space is always a situated and temporal phenomenon.
Brandon Labelle
I am very interested to develop this answer based on the idea of sound art as a field of practices. My work is very much focused on developing a historical and theoretical understanding of sound art and I approach that topic through the lens of space, architecture, urban experience and environment. I propose that sound art is a field of practices that understand sound as a spatial phenomenon, as a spatial possibility. In my writings, I have developed the idea of space through sound, through these different spatial volumes, from the object, the sculptural voice, and finally to the environment as a soundscape. It is a larger perspective, so it’s hard to capture a single idea about what sound space is, but of course it is many things, and takes different forms, different expressions, different articulations. I can say, generally speaking, that what I ended up finding out through sound and space are these relational intensities and these kinds of dynamic relational possibilities of understanding space through sound. That relationality opens up a sort of space imagination of what architecture is from a sonic perspective. What happens to architectural space if you approach it through sound? For me, it is much about sociality. Sound and space are two things that are influencing and facilitating social life and the relationships we have and/or get involved in. Sound art as a social practice and how space is part of that practice; I understand sound space as a sociality.
Practitioners are very aware of sound space as an entity, as a phenomenal medium, and they work with it to end up constructing different kinds of experiences of sound space; in other words, tuning sound space to create experiences, and invite us into those experiences. What interests me about sound art in relation to architecture is that artists are very interested in upsetting architecture. Sound as a medium that can intervene within the architectural environment, and upset the stability and the geometry of architecture. Sound is a medium that can trouble the architectural form and can also work with it, leading us to ideas of atmospheres or ideas of phenomenological vitality. Often, we can say this in a basic way as a conflict, presume the dichotomy of something that is static and non-static.
Sound space is this tension between time and space: a relational tension. A strange entity of those two things coming together. Sound brings architecture back to life as it agitates it molecularly. Through the voice of space, the space comes to life, and it’s a moment where you understand that everything has a voice and it is very dynamic; voice is always a social question.
Bernhard Leitner
When I left Europe for New York, I had the idea of building spaces – sculptural spaces with sound. I wanted to define sound as a material, as a building material. It was a very abstract idea, so for two years I did theoretical research, and then from 1971 to 1975 I did practical research. I rented a space in New York where I tried different configurations and different constellations to understand what it means for sound to travel. This was a very fascinating period because I discovered things that I didn’t know before. I understand that you don’t hear only with your ears, but also with the entire body as an acoustic sensor. In addition, I understood that the concept of space is quite different from an architectural conception which is static. Space in time has totally different concepts. The boundaries of sound spaces are not only going around, above and under you, but are also going through you.
The concept of sound space is still not really defined; there is no language for sound spaces. There is a vocabulary for sound, for architecture, for sculpture, but there is no vocabulary for sound space. This was a real challenge. People didn’t understand this, so I had to use photographs and texts, and describe things. Today is much easier because sound is available to everybody. At the very beginning, I worked with movements of sound, but the line was not a visual line, it was an acoustic line of moving sound. Lines of sound can define space aurally, so, I just replaced the points for speakers.
Daniel Neumann
I’ll start framing the concept of sound space as an instrument. I see the loudspeaker in connection with the space. My sound space instrument is going to create a sonic work – a composition. That instrument, between the architectural space and the loudspeaker, will create a sound space while triggering a relationship within the existing space. It creates something artificial, creates new tonalities, expands the existing space, morphs it. That’s the beauty of what sound can do with space, you can actually morph a three-dimensional space into something artificial or expansive that has the listener in it. That it’s not a separate thing like a painting on a wall. The beautiful thing about sound space is also that it includes the listener within it. Sound space to me is a temporary formation with all these different elements that make it happen in a certain moment. One of the fundamental elements is the listener who is inside of it and participating in its production. The space becomes a listening space and the listening space it is the sound space.
Francesc Daumal
Sound space for me would be the concept that combines sound with the design of space. It is the will of the architect who wants a space to sound in a certain way. It is a poetic act that transforms architecture in a representative space. When you enter a space and you feel emotionally impressed, you are in a representative space. It has to be large, bright, reverberant in one sector and intimate in another. All spaces should have a certain reverberation. Reverberation is an aspect of the sound space. A sound space will have a tone, certain timbres, it is designed with certain dimensions so that there are stationary frequencies that coincide with certain musical chords, because as a designer, I can tune the space.
The sound space has certain adjectives that allow the designer of the space to define it sonorously. The concept of sound space is not the acoustics, it is not the sounds emitted by the space, but the aesthetic value given to the sound context. The parameters with which the sound space is defined are given by the musical language: reverb, sound strength, tone, timbre, crescendo or decrescendo. All musical concepts can be transferred to space. When we have the language, we can express ourselves and we can design the sound space.
Anna Bofill
The sound space is a space that surrounds us, which is full of sounds. These sounds reach the auditory organ. The sound space is a magnetic field, a field of forces. Gravity governs not only earth, but also the cosmos, all of those relationships between the elements of the universe. The relation between one mass and another is the gravitational force and they create a gravitational field that would be equivalent to the sound space. A spatial sound field is similar to a gravitational field, with forces that affect sense.
Pablo Elinbaum
The concept of sound space is quite ambiguous, open and polysemic. For me the sound space is the space that we can perceive through listening, but it is not an acoustic space properly speaking, it is not a space designed to be built, but a space connected to experience, to the experiential, to the perceptive. I call it aural space rather than sound space; I think it is a more precise term. In any case, for me, aural space is a tool of knowledge, an interpretative tool of the environment, and therefore of quite broad and subjective utility. Architectural space is a Euclidean space, a geometric space, is modulated, perfectly delimited, while aural space – or sound space – is a non-Euclidean space, it’s discontinuous, heterogeneous, intermittent and disruptive. Architecture fractures space and sound brings it back together. Aural space is a performative space, and it is the space that is produced by the people’s activities. Aural space questions the methodological notions of urbanism, geography, architecture, as also those ideas of place, territory and scale. In aural space, these notions do not exist. It has a non-factual dimension. When we listen, some things can be verified, but there are other things that cannot, and then you do not know if you are imagining them, if it is a thing of suggestion, or of memory.
3. Sound Space Rhizome
The concept of sound space first appears in music with the inclusion of the spatial variable, which quickly expands through the discipline towards its borders and into other disciplines. In this process, it switches from a musical object to a transdisciplinary aesthetic event. Within the music field, Bayer (1981) describes four parameters of sound: duration, which is related to time, intensity to quantity, timbre to quality, and pitch to space. Thus, from a rather abstract conception arises a spatial approach to musical composition. The notion of space begins to engage an ambiguous scope of possibilities. First, a sound space is evident in musical notation, employing a spatial vocabulary that designates an imaginary space where sounds are arranged at different heights, intervals and depths, which together make the musical piece as a graphic expression of a certain sonic volumetry. Second, in terms of performance, we can notice the sound space displaying itself in the musical virtuosity of the interpreter, who has to build this sonic volumetry from the score with his instrument for it to be perceived by a listener:
Through the phenomenon of listening, space is thus perceived aurally by the subject; and it is within this aural perception that this sound space, first inscribed by the composer in the score, then physically concretized by the gestures of the performers, finally exists musically in a complete and effective way. (Bayer 1981: 11)
As Bayer states, the sound space is the spatial configuration that sound can delineate between not only its own tonal relationships and characteristics, but also the spatialisation of sound sources, which provides spatial relationships between the sound that is emitted and the reaction of the space that contains it. These ideas will organise the sound space as a transversal network of meanings that cross diverse dimensions and that will be named and classified by a range of terms, by authors such as Michel Chion (Reference Chion1999) with internal and external space, Denis Smalley (Reference Smalley2008) with composed and superimposed space, Karlheinz Stockhausen (Reference Stockhausen1958) with musik im raum, Murray Schafer (Reference Schafer1991) and Barry Truax (Reference Truax2006) with acoustic space, François Bayle (Reference Bayle1991) with acousmatic space, among others.
Within the field of music, the spatial arrangement of speakers will define the sound space, enabling the manipulation of physical space through the emission of sounds from different sonic points. These sounds may vary in rhythm, speed and movement, creating figures that traverse the space. Here, the concept of sound space is defined by the interplay between the sound produced and its spatial disposition. Sound spatialisation emerges as an instrument that can modulate a dialogue between the room morphologies and the speaker. The composition incorporates a spatial proposal aimed at reimagining the surrounding architecture, while projecting sound in space within a ‘diffused space’ (Smalley Reference Smalley2008: 123). As Neumann suggests, it is the composer’s creativity that determines how tonalities can expand and modify the existing space.
The development of sound spatiality was widely explored by Bayle’s Acousmonium (Figure 1). This instrument experiments with a heterogeneous arrangement of speakers and their relationship with space. Bayle considers space as something that is not purely objectual, but something traversed by time and speed: ‘Space is to be understood as a practice, a phenomenon and a representation’ (2008: 133). Sound space is presented here as a dynamic entity with creative agents, enabling us to hear it; sound has the ability of sounding space. In a perceptual process, this relation between space and sound is shaped as ‘energetic beings’ (Bayle 2008), which enables us to hear figures, diagrams, maps or images. For Bayle, the sounds in space are entities that take the form of sonic images that are only perceptible within the ‘realm of listening’. The sound space, as a temporary and ephemeral phenomenon arising from a creative act, can be apprehended by the listener as a plastic and autonomous element, shaped by the act of listening.
François Bayle performing the Acousmonium.Source: INA grm – Groupe de Recherches Musicales.
Daniel Neumann performing Soundfield for the Cistern. Courtesy of Festival Espacios Resonantes.
Circling, Bernhard Leitner, 1973, New York.
Sound Space Rhizome. Courtesy of authors.
The listener, as Neumann declares, is a constituent element of the sound space; ‘the beautiful thing about sound space is also that it includes the listener within it’. Without the listener, the sound space does not exist. It is they, the one who will produce the sound space through a listening experience. Within spectromorphology, a concept developed by Denis Smalley, we can analyse the listening experience, focusing on the interaction between the sound spectra and the way it is shaped through time and space (Smalley Reference Smalley1997). ‘Spectromorphology is not a compositional theory or method, but a descriptive tool based on aural perception’ (ibid.: 107). This sonic motion can suggest real or imagined sonic shapes involving the body within them.
Spectromorphology becomes a sonic dynamisation of the three-dimensional qualities within a listening space, shaped by both the sonic elements and the listener’s presence. This interaction highlights the importance of auditory perception, challenging the conventional understanding of sound space as aural rather than sonorous. Pablo Elinbaum addresses this dichotomy by introducing the term aural space in place of sound space, as he declares ‘a more precise term’ that refers to the space that appears while listening. In his artistic practice and research project Monuments of Aurality (2022), Elinbaum explores the auditory dimensions of spaces where social and spatial elements intersect, examining the social implications of sound on the physical environment. Aural figures resembling the sonic images proposed by Bayle and Smalley emerge within the context of contemporary urban space production. As Neumann suggests, ‘the space becomes a listening space and the listening space it is the sound space’, indicating that the sound space produces itself through aurality.
At the same time that sound builds space, sound is filtered by the space, while generating new sonic features with spatial attributes. In the piece Soundfield for the Cistern (Figure 2), performed at the Architecture and Listening Festival Espacios Resonantes (2022) in Santiago de Chile, Neumann used the Room Tone GeneratorFootnote 8 to attune sound to the space’s resonance, not necessarily aiming for mathematically precise resonance, but for tones that evoke a spatial sensation in the listener regarding the space’s response. The sound space is capable of mapping intensities via the sound pressure of spectral differences. As the listener participates in the conception of the sound space, one can transform their listening body into a constituent element of the space. From a perceptual approach, sound space is a dynamic morphing entity shaped by the body and triggered by the corporeal presence and actions. Its temporal and oscillating nature distinguishes it as an event or propagating force rather than a static object. An action of going. Going through a certain space-time that has a beginning and an end.
The relationship of the speaker with space and the body follows a unique triad that defines sound space as a phenomenal element, as notably exemplified in Bernhard Leitner’s series of sound installations – Sound Gate, Sound Slope, Corridor Variations, Wall of Sound, Sound Waves, Oscillating Boundaries, among others – developed and exhibited at his gallery in New York (Figure 3). These installations consisted of structures made of wooden elements, each 4 m long, supporting up to 48 loudspeakers. These structures were designed to test various motions of sound in space, including ‘a vertical descending line of sound, sound crossing below and above a moving person, the guiding characteristics of a horizontal motion, various degrees of inclination of straight lines of sound, sound moving towards a person, sound moving away from a person, loopliness in horizontal and vertical grids of loudspeakers’ (Leitner Reference Leitner1978: 14).
Leitner’s sound installations, which he designates as sound spaces, use sound as a material for building invisible spaces through sound spatialisation. In Leitner’s conception, the space in motion becomes an invisible element, with the body serving as a listening system capable of translating the abstraction of sound space into spatial sensations. After his time in New York, Leitner re-evaluated the conception of space as something static and inanimate. The sound space has a life of its own, fed by our own body as an acoustic sensorium, thus actively participating in its conformation. Leitner suggests the notion of space as a sequence of spatial sensations triggered by sound – a temporal event where ‘space unfolds in time; it is developed, repeated, and transformed in time’ (Leitner Reference Leitner1978: 13). Sonic embodiment establishes a relationship between the sound installations that comprises a space and the body that experiences it. Leitner’s artworks are different types of ‘musical’ instruments for producing space through listening, where each one of them has a particular way of defining space: ‘a listener has to continually resituate him or herself not only to find the sculpture but, more important, to realise it’ (Labelle Reference Labelle2015: 169).
Leitner’s sound spaces can generate a large number of spatio-temporal experiences. They propose new forms of sonic embodiment, in which the action of creating sound space is in itself the sonic experience. The physical presence of sound moves around the body and trespasses the body; as he argues, ‘the boundaries of sound spaces are not only going around, above, and under you, but are going through you.’ Leitner’s installations were intended to be perceived by the body in different ways, through body movement by traversing the sound space, or by letting the sound space inhabit the body, wrapping it as an envelope. The effect of his sound spaces generates an expanded appreciation of the spatial sensation: a dynamic and morphing space, ephemeral, modified second by second. This sensorial activation of the body is an expanded way of listening, which triggers a space with multiple interpretations that, through the auditory imagination, produces a sounding infrastructure.
Architecture becomes performative as it responds to sonic movements experienced by the body within a physical surrounding. As sound flows through space, different acoustic phenomena emerge in this process, such as absorption, diffraction and acoustic reflection. The space – the room – is a sonic filter which transforms sound by multiplying or diminishing its volumetric presence through acoustics. The spectral response of space to certain frequencies is part of the possible forms of interaction between sound and space; each part of the spectrum behaves differently. For example, the high frequencies are directional and as the frequency decreases, the sound loses directionality, until it reaches the low and sub-low frequencies becoming omnidirectional, generating a ubiquity effect of sounds that seems to come from everywhere.
Although the entire sound phenomenon – emission, propagation, reception – participates in the sound space conformation, it is undoubtedly that propagation is presented as a generative force directly related with space. In his work, Alvin Lucier explores the shaping of sound spaces through the manipulation of sound as an artistic material, delving into its natural properties and its impact within the acoustic characteristics of architectural spaces. Within this framework, works such as I Am Sitting in a Room and Vespers (Lucier and Simon Reference Lucier and Simon1980) reveal the tonality of space through its acoustic reflections. In I Am Sitting in a Room, the repetition of the same recording is exposed to the space, gradually deforming the audio as the acoustics interact, eventually isolating and reinforcing the resonant frequencies of the room. In Vespers, Lucier employs the principle of echolocation, sending a sound impulse into space to study its acoustic response.
The question of space as subject matter can be modified through architectural design to create a filtering effect; sound space can be crafted through architectural interventions. Modifying the physical space will alter the filter that shapes the sound space. Daumal’s architectural interventions treat space as an instrument, as a great box of resonances. In his architectural practice, he has the ability to qualify the space sonorously, transferring the language of music to the language of architecture. This perspective shifts our understanding of sound space from the phenomenal to the material realm, framing it as a physical issue stemming from the interaction between sound and architectural space. Lucier’s exploration of echolocation delves into our sensory capacity to perceive the material impact on acoustic responses and how matter and architectural forms influence our interpretation of sonic reflections in space. When we listen, we instantaneously perceive space, as every sound we hear is indicative of a particular spatial context, as even music denotes the conditioned space of recording.
All human beings have the ability to sense space and interpret it; this ability is a survival mechanism. Through sound reflection, architecture becomes audible, allowing us to perceive the physical presence of space through auditory means. The materiality of space becomes phenomenal when we actively listen to architecture, enabling us to experience its tangible essence in a profound and sensory manner. Blesser and Salter propose the term aural architecture referring to how we listen to the multiple sound sources interacting with the spatial elements of their context and the symbolic meaning attributed to them by the listener. This suggests a shift from the broader concept of ‘listening to space’ to the more precise action of ‘listening to architecture’. Transitioning from Leitner’s sound installations to Lucier’s performances, there is a progression from the purely sonic to the acoustic matter of the sound space. It encompasses not only the physical presence of sound, but also its acoustic impact on the listener. Daumal’s notion of representative space refers to a space that can acoustically convey its essence, whether it is intimate or public, reflecting its social and cultural significance. This process imbues the space with meaning, transforming it into a specific and qualified place with a spirit in coherence to its sociality.
To evaluate aural architecture in its cultural context, we must ascertain how acoustic attributes are perceived: by whom, under what conditions, for what purposes, and with what meanings. Understanding aural architecture requires an acceptance of the cultural relativism for all sensory experiences. (Blesser and Salter Reference Blesser and Salter2009: 3)
Lucier’s echolocation performance Vespers serves as a practical example of how Navigation Spatiality operates, as described by Blesser and Salter (Reference Blesser and Salter2009). They define this term as ‘those aural cues that allow us to successfully move through a space without using vision’ (ibid.: 58), presenting aural architecture as an interpretative tool for recognising architectural morphology through sound. In contrast, Elinbaum’s and Daumal’s approach to aural architecture takes a different perspective, viewing it as an object especially designed for sounding in a particular manner. Instead of the term aural architecture, Elinbaum presents the concept of aural space as a tool for exploratory research of environmental sound, which serves to discover the aurality of existing spaces. The aural space is something pre-existent and implicit, which through certain operations or attitudes of listening we can discover it, like an archaeological act of revealing something that is there, but hidden. It is a space that is known only through listening, linked to experience and perception, and therefore essentially subjective. It is performative and produces itself through the social. Unlike traditional architectural space, aural space is a non-Euclidean space, heterogeneous and intermittent. It integrates a series of contextual and associative elements between the spatial, the sounding and the bodies. Its performative aspect has a phenomenological basis that allows us to understand spatiality through the sounds that are generated within a social interaction that is, at the same time, part of that physical context. Listening is a receptor of all that sociality reflected from space, where voices converge with resonances of architecture and cultural production. The architectural space is redesigned through a sonic experience, modifying the meaning of what it is to inhabit a space, while through sound, space is able to inhabit the body.
Aural architecture and aural space, intertwined concepts, enrich the conceptual territory of sound space, providing new insights and deeper understanding. The sound space takes various forms and expressions; ranging from the sculptural effect of the voice in the architectural space, the environmental expression in the soundscape, to the volumetric sculptures of sound installations within the auditory realm. It delineates a network of dynamic and intensive relationships, and is within this conjunction of relationships from where the sound space emerges. These relations involve bodies and voices in interaction. Sound space exists within a sociality, where, as LaBelle mentioned earlier, ‘sound and space are two things that are influencing and facilitating social life and the relationships we have and/or get involved in’. This sociality will make the environment and the architecture vibrate, therefore creating an acoustic event that triggers a dynamic situation between the cultural production and the space that receives and reacts, generating diverse effects of expansion or contraction. The modulation of sound will be the task not only of the space, but also of the bodies that inhabit it, that intervene and constitute it. The sound space is in the voices, between the bodies and through the bodies, in the air, in propagation, in time, in architecture; it is everywhere:
Sound thus performs with and through space: it navigates geographically, reverberates acoustically, and structures socially, for sound amplifies and silences, contorts, distorts, and pushes against architecture; it escapes rooms, vibrates walls, disrupts conversation; it expands and contracts space by accumulating reverberation, relocating place beyond itself, carrying it in its wave, and inhabiting always more than one place; it misplaces and displaces; like a car speaker blasting too much music, sound overflows borders. It is boundless on the one hand, and site-specific on the other. (LaBelle Reference Labelle2015: xiii)
LaBelle’s perspective on sound space is closely related to sound art, which he describes as a ‘field of practices that understand sound as a spatial phenomenon’. Sonic practices have a direct impact on the notions of spatiality; they serve as the unifying element for understanding sound space through the convergence of its sonorous, acoustic and auditory aspects. It is a relational production within a dynamic concept that constantly evolves and acquires new meanings through its material and phenomenological expressions. Sound has evolved as an artistic medium, particularly in its interaction with spatiality; at the same time that matter is affected by the movement of sound, matter is also affecting and modifying sound, filtering it. The space is defined by its acoustic presence that is agitated by social and environmental sounds, amplifying life within. As LaBelle states, ‘Sound brings architecture back to life, it agitates it molecularly.’ The spatial experience involves participating in the dialogue between sound sources and surrounding space, where the acoustic response reflects its morphology and dimension through its voice.
The Listening Biennial, directed by LaBelle, serves as an experimental laboratory, bringing together different voices from artists, researchers, institutions and collectives. It focuses on listening as a relational capacity, a philosophical and political proposition, a creative practice and a research framework. The project provides a context for the discussion and presentation of listening practices in relation to site-specificity. These listening practices are social, temporal and geographical, positioning the subject within a specific site, thus establishing the foundation from which the relational character of sound space emerges. The contextual aspect of space transforms sound into a localised presence, thereby defining sound space as a site-specific practice. This practice promotes the dematerialisation of art by constructing ephemeral situations and actions unique to specific spaces. According to Atienza, ‘sound space is always a situated and temporary phenomenon’. Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge (Haraway Reference Haraway1988) refers to information derived directly from our situated experience, which we can understand through our senses or alternative forms of knowledge, different from the dominating ones such as science, language and a priori knowledge.
Gaining understanding of sound through space and space through sound is a form of knowledge that can only be accessed through our direct experience of listening in situ. As Neumann suggests, listening will always be situated and phenomenal. In Atienza’s series of artistic interventions, Playing the Space, he uses instruments and voices in urban environments to gain alternative insights into the city. These practical tools act as sonic interruptions, which promote a variation of the normal urban situations by composing and recomposing the existing rhythms and resonances. Sound in these interventions is contextualised within spatial and social situations. As in LaBelle’s social conception of sound space, Atienza traces a flux from the object to the subject, and to their intersections, thus illustrating the role of sound as an active agent within social and political contexts.
The idea of a flux involving sound as a continuous material flow is denoted as sonic flux by Christophe Cox (Reference Cox2018), sustained by the exploration of sound substrate and the establishment of new relationships between sound and the production of reality. One of Cox’s key concepts for exploring the sonic flux is the room tone, which refers to the background noise of a room, the base tonality of the space, usually manifested as a low-level sonic hum. The term is often used in films to create a sonic baseline for the soundtrack. Neumann uses the room tone to create spatial tonalities by exploring the resonances between the sonic flux and the space. The background noise clears the path for the sound space flux to emerge, transitioning from its architectural origins to become spaces for artistic action (Balbontín and Klenner Reference Balbontín and Klenner2021). In the piece I Am Sitting in a Room, Lucier uses the room tone to delve into the substance of the sound space, exploring its materiality and resonances with the architectural space. For Cox, the room tone is a certain sample of the sonic flux, described as ‘the immemorial background noise out of which human sounds emerge and into which they recede’ (2018: 130).
This materialistic perspective implies the continuous presence of sound over time, with room tone serving as an atemporal base throughout history. An example of this historical room tone is McLuhan’s description of the Eskimos’ conception of white surroundings in the Arctic as an acoustic space – a dark place of the mind without horizon, direction or limits, but full of sounds (McLuhan and Carpenter Reference McLuhan, Carpenter, McLuhan and Carpenter1960). While Bofill’s concept of sound space as a place ‘full of sounds’ proposes an immersive and powerful space resembling a magnetic field, here sound is relational, active and a vibrating intensive force. Bofill compares sound space to a gravitational field, where orbiting sounds follow a certain logic, shaping the space. This materialistic interpretation of sound space allows us to perceive it as something plastic, as an object that has a life of its own – that grows, mutates, fades and grows again. Therefore, sound space can occasionally exist independently of the listener, while at other times, it becomes the listener itself. It is a relational entity that integrates various terms, appreciations, visions, perspectives and practices, spanning from theoretical to practical and from physical to sensory.
4. Conclusions
Sound is a transdisciplinary entity that wanders around the field of arts, music and architecture in its expanded diversity. The sound space is a concept that has a long story, breaking out in the second half of the twentieth century until our recent times. In those years, sound has migrated from music to sound art with the inclusion of space and architecture. This migration process has expanded those practices and theories for building a conceptual territory around the notion of sound space. The resultant territory takes the form of an interconnected map or network of practices with a non-hierarchical structure. Each practice constituting a niche inside this interconnected system is independent and autonomous. It is an assemblage of heterogeneity where each piece has its own logic and cooperates for an ongoing growth and spreading of the network as a dynamic phenomenon. Sound space is not a binary dichotomy, self-conforming between music and sound art, but a rhizomatic system where different practices use sound as a spatial phenomenon and space as a sounding entity. The Sound Space Rhizome (Figure 4) is built from a multiplicity of perspectives and points of views, different authors and researchers have taken the subject of study as a starting point for explaining a conceptual force that spread in multiple directions. In a similar way, artists, musicians and practitioners in general have introduced practices, methods and aesthetic actions for pushing a dialogue between sound and space. Some of the terms mentioned in this article – the room tone, acoustic space, aural space, aural architecture, performative space, listening space, among others – are a group of terms that refer to those practices that become nodes of a bigger system. They relate with each other in a horizontal structure forming a vibrating organism that is made up of autonomous microsystems that work in conjunction as an alliance. These autonomous units have substantial differences that situate them as unique pieces of a puzzle.
Time is a constitutive component of the sound space that will be relative to each type of practice. In music, the temporal form is usually a linear narrative that has a beginning and an end, and a specific structure that leads sounds to a sequence of moments that build up a story. In Bayer’s conception, the sound space is built through an expanded discourse of articulated units in a linear temporal development from the score to the mise en scène. The discursive form of sound space in music is fragmented in other temporality while transitioning to the field of arts. As in Leitner’s work, linearity is replaced by looping fragments, shaping some sort of staticity that represents, through repetition, the idea of an atemporal space. The rhizomatic territory will include different temporalities that coexist inside one same entry as also in the conjunction of them, some of them being chronologically established while others are asynchronous. The relation with the listener will vary depending on that. Those non-chronological practices closer to the field of sound art will conduct time in a representational form, where perception and social constructions could express an augmented notion of temporality through cultural and symbolic appreciation.
The phenomenal approach to sound space opens an extended path to the interpretative world of imagination. Smalley’s tool in spectromorphology provides a doorway between the world of the sound spectra in terms of substratum and the world of sensation and experience. The complexity of the sound spectrum will be perceived morphologically in terms of tonality as well as in terms of temporality. Blesser and Salter reflect on how sound interacts with spatial morphology to send a filtered message to the body that will perceive and interpret, mixing it with symbolic associations, to identify the personality of space. In opposition to this phenomenological perspective, Cox’s sonic flux, as a background noise that is permanently present, is not a phenomenological element, as we can only perceive it partially through an unconscious listening. It is a sonic matter that exists beyond our perception; a ‘sonic murmur generated by the minute movements of air particles in enclosed spaces’ (Cox Reference Cox2009: 24). Alvin Lucier artworks use this sonic matter to transduce brain signals to sound, speech to spatial frequencies, and sound impulses to sonic spatial response. All these different perspectives situate the notion of sound space in a diversity range that goes from phenomenal to material, from conceptual to literal.
This territory of ideas and practices could be understood as an extended binarism, which through polarities opens a complete spectrum of a gradient repertoire between poles. LaBelle’s idea of sound as a spatial phenomenon, activated and received by a social force, brings site-specificity to an essential aspect of the sound space. Even though acousmatic music was the first one to appropriate musical space through sound spatialisation, there is a big gap from the created sound space to a contextual one. In a site-specific context, the concern on the object shifts from the sound space as a creative tool to the sound space as an exploratory tool. Here the practice introduced is not for making but for knowing. This difference is the result of a diversity of processes and methodologies to get to something ‘similar’ but essentially different. Site-specific is to ‘move away from the fabrication of objects to the dematerialised potential of events’ (LaBelle Reference Labelle2015: xiv). Sound as a social force that provides a means to activate perception, including personal and collective interpretations, also presents the sound space as a tool of interpretation.
Within the Sound Space Rhizome, the listening body, acting as a conduit for accessing auditory knowledge, gives the sound space a phenomenal quality, linking the representative space and the aural space within a listening space. However, the listening body is situated within a specific context, where spatial morphologies contribute to shaping its own sonic substratum as background noise and/or room tone. Thus, the perceived sound space undergoes a transformation from a phenomenal entity to a material manifestation, taking on the form of a tangible sonic being. Using conceptual tools such as spectromorphology analysis, these manifestations can be understood as energetic entities within a performative space or images-of-sound in an acousmatic space. These sonic images may take the form of invisible sound sculptures, created through atemporal narratives within the field of sound art, or by chronological narratives of spatialized sound within the music domain. In architecture, sonic images appear as invisible spaces of sound, discovered through echolocation as an exploratory tool of aural architecture. The social body and its voices relate to one another through sonic relationships and with the surrounding context. Sound space emerges as a relational and localised presence, shaping not only physical forms but also affective characteristics. Through a process of signification, the social body begins to shape both sound and space with symbolic meaning, united by a common goal: that of giving cultural form to the sound space.
Sound space organises itself as a natural ecosystem, with dynamic relationships between sound, space and bodies, connecting different ontological and metaphysical dimensions, and articulating a multiplicity of ideas and practices that celebrate diversity by converging a complex heterogeneity of methods and processes. Each part of this system interacts in a networked and interdependent manner, affecting and nourishing each other dynamically. Different disciplines are involved outlining a transdisciplinary field where a broad range of conceptual and material elements relate and evolve through phenomenal and physical forces. These sonic agents constitute an interconnected network of roles that contribute to specific parts of the system. While constantly changing and modifying practices, the units of the ecosystem are in a constant evolutionary process, which makes the whole system alive and morphing. Therefore, the sound space is a transconcept (Granger Reference Granger1994), a conceptual dynamisation and a restless flow of ideas, constantly integrating and organising a multiplicity of theoretical elements into an evolving abstract macro-structure.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all interviewees for their time and interest in participating in this research project: Ricardo Atienza, Brandon Labelle, Bernhard Leitner, Daniel Neumann, Francesc Daumal, Ana Bofill and Pablo Elinbaum.
