99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-21- BLDGBLOG: On Sound

Episode Date: April 1, 2011

Most sound design in architecture is centered around designing for silence. Buildings are trying to block out that constant stream noise from the street and insulate you from those jarring clangs of industry. Geoff Manaugh loves the intersection of sound … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21centri.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. And this is Jeff Mayno. My name is Jeff Mayno. I'm an architecture writer and blogger based in Los Angeles.

And for seven years, he has written a website called Building Blog, which is about architectural conjecture, urban speculation, and landscape futures. I've always liked the sounds of things and the acoustic nature walking through the city or even just the sense that when you're walking down a hall that has really rich lush wall coverings the right side can sound totally different from the left side. I've just always been interested in those 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 you know having said that there was an interesting project a couple years ago by an architect named Joel Sanders. It was basically an architectural design. Instead of standard glass windows it would use things like parabolic microphones kind of like those things that you see people

holding on the sides of the football field during NFL games. These parabolic microphones would be pointed at the sky or they'd be pointed out into the woods nearby or 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.

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 quote unquote sound garden. Rather than being the 1990s 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 the year. There are certain species that when they bloom the seed pod opens up with an audible pop. 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 kind of 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 silky and silvery sort of tree brushing sound. That's one thing I think is really quite interesting that you could actually deliberately sort of build an acoustic ecosystem. You know, you could you could easily imagine that sort of thing being added on to a kind of botanic garden so that you pay money to go literally listen to plant life. Jeff Mayno is also interested in archaeoacoustics. Good question. 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 what was 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 quonk shells that would be played to do ritualistic music and that sort of thing. The building was actually

physically designed to be as echoey as possible. The buildings 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 archaeoacoustics. It's like Indiana 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 with an architecture of how to build something that's contextually specific and really responds to its site. But the site, quote unquote, 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 sort

of 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. 99% invisible was produced this week by Nick Vanderkulk. I'm your host, Roman Mars. The program is made possible with support from 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 Jeff Maynows' Building Blog, which is essential reading you should absolutely go there. And Nick Vanderkulk's Love in radio, which is a program he does for voclow.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 got I have eighth grade kids who listen to this I couldn't do it I just couldn't do it Anyway you should absolutely check it out if you're an adult you will love it

it's at loveandradio.org and you'll find a link to that on 99%invisible.org .org.