MATTEO MELIOLI
INHABITING SOUNDSCAPE
ARCHITECTURE OF THE UNSEEN WORLD
Melioli Matteo
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Bartlett School of the Built Environment, London, UK
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NOTE
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In early June 2006, a group of over one hundred artists and researchers met for a three-day conference in the Architecture Building at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, to discussfrom as many different viewpoints as possiblethe varying relationships between sound and space. This conference was part of soundaXis, a city-wide festival involving most of Torontos new music community and organised by the Toronto Coalition of New Music Presenters. Out of the lively discussions at this conference, two primary themes emerged: the fraught condition of the relationship between sound as space, and the problematic role of representation and its twin, translation, in any discussion of this relationship.
The book is called 'In the Place of Sound: Architecture, Music, Acoustics, edited by Colin Ripley, Marco L. Polo, Arthur Wrigglesworth.
The book presents thirteen essays taken from the conference which address one, or both, of these primary themes. In addition, seven graphic essays have been included which present projects in which architects explicitly take on sound as a generating material in their designs.
The resulting chapters in the book provide a diverse and, hopefully, provocative collection of ideas and images. They are meant not so much as a comprehensive study of the sound]space nexussuch a study may not actually be possible but as a place to begin the discussion.
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ABSTRACT
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In 'Space', the object - or architecture - is generated by a cumulative process of information (geometrical transformations, visual sequences, sound structure…) directly related to the psychological and physiological user's frames. Each interaction transforms the visible environment in a dynamic, elastic and multidirectional imaginary space. The relationship between the object-space system (geometrical and phenomenological determinate) and the body-mental projection system (subjective view /aural decoded data ) induces new modes of perception strictly connected to the inner spatial geometry and its physical reflecting (aural and lighting) phenomena.
Sound as well light reveals cryptic information about the space via echo and reverberations. Those non linear physical process articulate the space along a dynamic and continuous medium and the geometrical space suggested by echo and reverberation not longer deals with Euclidean but with Multidimensional spaces. In this work, the conception of 'Space' explores structurally and visually the dynamic process engaged in a huge architectural volume (the Byzantine Saint Mark's basilica in Venice) by reflections of the acoustic rays produced by a polyphonic song and the following transcription of reflections phenomena into geometric parameters and shapes.
This process enhances how the same acoustic phenomena distorts the architectural space creating “ghost-spaces”. These “unreal” spaces will exist even beyond the physical limits of real architecture. As a consequence this doubling process will destroy the spatial identity (perceptive level) as well as the centrality role of the subject (existential level). The space and the listener will dissolve into a new geometrical and psychological pattern, mutable, dynamic and elastic.
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Figure 1. Left: Venice and St. Mark's basin, middle: the extrados of the Basilica domes (author’s picture taken from the bell tower ) right: Interior of St Mark’s looking east. To the right of the iconostasis is the pulpitum magnum cantorum, also known as the bigonzo; to the left is the two-tier pulpitum novum lectionum. Photo Böhm, Venice
INTRODUCTION: GEOMETRY AS FROZEN MUSIC[1].
Music and light are partly a matter of solid geometry, in the sense that sounds and rays of light propagate according to definite geometrical patterns. Athanasius Kircher during the 17th century wrote that “(…) sound is a geometrical emanation of its source,” stating, in other words, that the Euclidean theories were at the heart of the acoustic phenomena, and that it was possible to plot (through bundles of radial straight lines) the route taken by sound waves.
Another reason for investigating musical sound in terms of architectural geometry “has to do with the spaces within which sounds are produced and heard. A basilica, legislative chamber or concert hall, designed to reinforce and clarify musical and spoken sound, can be thought as an enlarged version of a musical instrument's resonator, or even of the human voice box. “Architectural acoustics” is a modern discipline, but the subject itself goes back into antiquity. The Greeks and Romans built indoor theatres for music known as “odeia”[1]. The spaces presumably sought to channel and amplify the performers' music and speech. As to outdoor structures, where the audiences were usually much larger, Vitruvius discusses the use of strategically placed sound resonators or boosters (Vitruvius, De Architectura, 5.5.1). Presumably when speakers and singers sounded those pitches, their notes were amplified or perhaps transmitted to a different part of the audience. The 16th century, while almost always quoting Vitruvius, embarked on its own elaborations of these ideas. The French natural philosopher and musical theorist Marin Mersenne [10] [11] begins his treatise Harmonicorum Libri (1636) with a short illustrated essay on architectural acoustics, maintaining that “sonic rays” (radios sonoros) are projected in conical form. The rays bounce off inclined planes and can be mapped onto screens using reflectors shaped like half-ellipses or parabolas. The reflectors focus and project sounds by locating the speaker or player at one ellipse's two foci. Additionally, Kircher's Musurgia Universalis (1650) is a landmark in the history of acoustic theory. He is particularly concerned with echoes and reverberations, writing about caves and classical buildings where strange, elaborated echoes can be heard, and about how echoes may be bounced onward for long periods of time. Kircher also reinforces the analogies, so common in the late Renaissance period, between music and light. According to him, sound especially musical sound is the ape of the light: sonus lucis simia est. He diagrams the geometries of the linea actionis phonicae, the line of ray of “phonic action”. For Kircher, acoustics like optics is a matter of spherical and conic sections. Following this method in its essence, we will start by considering the acoustic geometry of a wide volume like the one of a Byzantine church, St. Mark's in Venice (figure 1). Built in the 10th century, the church is of the Greek-cross plan, with transepts of the same length and vaults of the same height, ideally tending towards a circular space. Moreover, the whole church typology seems to repeat, almost in a fractal fashion, the same basic circularity, traceable (in decreasing scale) in the domes, vaults, apses, and even in the columns themselves.
The sections (figure 2) also display in quantity what the ratio is among the radia of the respective circumferences that, following Fibonacci's sequence, draw a parallel with the cochlis progression of the human aural apparatus [2]. There is, therefore, in St. Mark's basilica, the intangible but consistant presence of an acoustic design, at times conscious, at times unconscious, that certainly influenced the centuries-old development of this building. The church, in fact, for the characteristics of its geometrical space and the kind of material covering it[2] , behaves like a huge sounding box, amplifying the resonance of sounds, and extending the period of their echo.
During the 16th century, composers like Giovanni Gabrieli [8] [9] and Biagio Marini wrote the “Sonatas in Echo” which, exploiting the peculiar acoustics of the basilica, produced sophisticated effects of sound distortion, such as the protraction of the echo, or the harmonic overlapping of a note with the reverberation of the previous one. In those same years, the practice of the Salmi Spezzati ('divided or Split Psalms') was introduced, which consists of arranging the choir on two different lofts, opposing one another from the two sides of the nave [3] . Whereas the choir's splitting, in the field of acoustic phenomena, doubles the echo's depth, the same phenomenon, in the field of sound perception, manifests itself in the image of an elastic space, deep, dilated beyond the visual spacial boundaries of the church. Hearing the echo of a sound expanding from side to side is as if the image of the basilica, with its columns and mosaics, transformed slowly into something similar to the sonority of the hollow belly of a grotto [4]. Particular sounds, exalted by the acoustics of the building, have the power of evoking, so to speak, the idea of a space exceedingly wide, accelerating our imagination in a race towards infinity (figure 3).
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Figure 2. Left: cross section of St Mark's Basilica trough the transept nave (see in the background the iconostasis and the two pulpits ), middle: plan of the church, right: cross section trough the main nave. Courtesy of the Procuratia di San Marco, Venice
ACOUSTIC GEOMETRY: EUCLIDEAN PATTERN IN AURAL PHENOMENA.
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The “Sonatas in Echo” imitate an acoustic phenomenon i.e. the echo that works through definite physical mechanisms which follow (Marsenne and Kircher) geometrical Euclidean patterns. But how do these mechanisms work exactly, and how can they, in the last resort, lead to the distortion of spatial perception? Let's move in time and space, and imagine ourselves walking down into the tube, hearing a train arrive from a distance. Thinking we understand from which side of the corridor the train is coming, we are surprised to find that the sound heard from the left actually comes from the train arriving from the right. The reflection inside the tunnel “deceives” our perception, driving it to represent the existence of a train where no train actually exists, and the deception lasts till our sight is able to verify the real train as it arrives opposite our expectation. The walls, like mirrors, reflect the sound rays, projecting their real source the train beyond the wall, giving us the impression that the sound is coming from an “imaginary” train (or a “ghost” train) that exists only by virtue of the reflecting wall. In Euclidean geometry, this phenomenon is well represented by conic reversal projections, and the example of the train in the tube demonstrates how Kircher's acoustic geometry can faithfully represent the reality of sound phenomena.
Going back to St. Mark's, let's consider the acoustic geometry of the basilica's internal space; that is, let's imagine placing the sound sources on the pulpits where the Salmi Spezzati were performed and leaving the spread of sound rays to trace their reflections along the basilica walls (figure 4). Some reflections will cover the space of the church tens of times before reaching the listener located under the central dome. With every reflection, the geometrical space transfers to the incident wave part of its geometrical features, modifying the internal composition of its frequencies. The modified sound wave conveys to the listener the sound characteristics of the space that contained it during all the reflections. Considering, in the specific, the route of some acoustic rays, it is apparent how they travel far and wide through the whole space of the basilica, connecting different and opposing points of the church. Each of these points transfers to the wave its geometrical features which the sound moves elsewhere, reflection after reflection. The sound, acting as a sort of dynamic spatial memory, manages to connect images otherwise scattered at the time of their perception.
An acoustic image is, therefore, characterized as the completely absorbing experience of a space, because it is capable of giving back to the observers, the moment they hear it, the interaction of a sound with the space that contained it, reflection after reflection. A sound reflected and sent back from wall to wall saturates the internal volume of the basilica, and prolongs the impulse for many seconds. Going back to our example, a listener located under the central dome perceives the sound coming from each direction, reflected by the walls and floor, with decreasing volume and reverberation period. Cognitive psychology tells us that our sensory apparatus places a sound source (also invisible ones) farther away, the smaller it is in terms of sound volume. With the progressive decrease of the reverberation, the listener himself, although able to see the orchestra playing beside him, is instinctively lead to imagine it moving away, beyond the basilica's walls, beyond those walls which, like mirrors, reflect both the sound and its source (figure 5). Extending the example, it is as if the whole space of the church dilates beyond St. Mark's, to the extent of reaching St. George island. Sound has therefore the power of deforming spatial perception, making space assume geometrical configurations that are complex and not linear, configurations of “ghost” spaces extending beyond the physiological boundaries of our visual perception.
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Figure 3: Preliminary studies of the propagation of acoustic rays in volumes with circular vaults. The drawing introduces the idea of a surface (top centre) that is moved away and distorted by the sound reflections.
Figure 4. Reflected standing waves. The moment of overlapping is called interference, and it represents the sum of the single wave fronts.
SOUNDSCAPE
Anyone who has indeed experienced the echo in a dark space, such as the interior of a tank or Byzantine basilica, 'can attest to the extraordinary capacity of the ear to carve an immense volume into the void of darkness. The space traced by the ear becomes a vast cavity sculpted in the very interior of the mind [28]'. The echo reflected by the walls puts us in direct contact with a space invisible to the eye; thus, sound becomes the measure and scale of our perception, moulding a space intimate and vague in our imagination. On the one hand, sound has the power to reveal invisible links; on the other hand, though, it is also able to carry the listener to an imaginary world that does not necessarily correspond to the visual world.
But how does this transfiguration take place? What are the mechanisms at work in our imagination? I believe that part of the answer is to be found in the way sound reflected by the walls reaches the listener; consequently, it is important to study those reflecting phenomena regulating acoustic transmission. The language of geometry enables us to approximate rather exactly the behaviour of a sound phenomenon. Although not limited to this, it is undeniable that acoustical geometries are a starting point we cannot avoid. Let's first consider a cubic environment within which are placed a sound source and a perceptor, the latter being located in the geometrical centre of the space (figure 6).
Sound propagates along straight trajectories; when these rays strike the cube's sides, they are reflected at an angle that equals the angle of incidence. The outcome of this reflection is that the real sound source is projected beyond the walls of the acoustic chamber to locations that are farther and farther away as the number of the reflections increases. This is the imaginary source from where the listener perceives the sound coming, while the sum of the infinite reflected sources defines the shape of the acoustic space, both in geometrical and perceptive terms. In fact, when perceiving sounds coming from somewhere far away or close by, the listener is led to imagine the existence of a space whose boundaries follow the acoustic experience he is witnessing. Anyway it does not matter from what standpoint we consider it being physiology, geometry or phenomenology the fact remains that in a closed environment sound distorts space perception, because we perceive sounds coming from sources that are not real and their location depends on each reflection.
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figure 5. A sound produced inside the basilica gives the listener back the image of space extending beyond the bounds of real space. The echo of the reflected sound, in fact, reaches the ear with a delay that forces the listener to place the source at an immeasurably far distance. The acoustic space generated by the countless imaginary sources becomes like the orange coloured area in the drawing that, extending beyond the walls, creates an imaginary space enshrouding the church entirely
As time and reflections increase, little by little the cubic shape of the sound chamber it is then perceived as an expanding circular space (figure 7). The dynamic nature of this movement associates the configurations represented, to a vortical motion, still similar to the movement of fluids. In fact, the sides of the cube, while in the process of deforming, extend like thin films wrapped around the main body of acoustic space. The final configuration is like a round space, wrapped in six layers originating from the six sides of the cube. To better understand the figure 7 it is necessary to consider that in a lapse of one second, a 1000 cubic meter space is covered by an acoustic ray almost one million times, generating thousands of reflections. The intensity of these reflections diminishes exponentially as time passes, quickly falling below the threshold of audibility [1]. The first reflections are, therefore, those that really determine the perception of an acoustic space and are represented in sequence in this diagram. In reality, acoustic space also undergoes, beside deformation, an expansion that has not been represented here. If we compare the original solid and the final solid, it is evident that the figure's vertexes revolved clockwise, shrouding the space around the core, reminding us of the movement of a vortex. If we go into the nature of this movement (figure 8), we discover that even if the shape of the acoustic space varies, some of its properties are unchanging. If we look at the diagram, in fact, we can see that each curvature has a radius whose centre gradually moves away from the previous one at a distance connected to the size of the acoustic chamber. The centres themselves gather in confined areas of space, corresponding to the cube's centre of gravity.
These and other properties show that, even if consistently changing its shape, the acoustic space maintains a constitutive connection to the initial cubic space. The reason of this continuity is to be found in the fact that sound is able to interact with the geometrical space that contains it.
With every reflection the geometrical space transfers to the incident wave part of its geometrical features, modifying the internal composition of its frequencies. The modified sound wave will transfer to the listener the specific sound of that space. In a cube, the rays are free to travel through its volume without any obstacles, generating an acoustic space whose profile is continuous and uniform. But what happens in a space whose geometry is complex and articulate? Let's examine Saint Mark's basilica.
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figure 6.a, 6.b, 6.c. The trajectory of the sound ray is obtained through geometry by means of repeated reversals (A, B, C, D) of source and perceptor.The reflected sources are imaginary points of space obtained through geometry by joining perceptor P to the point corresponding to the last reflection. The resulting straight line represents the direction from which P actually hears the sound coming. The distance of the location of reflected sources is the sum of all the lengths travelled by each reflection. The greater the number of the reflections, the longer the distance.
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By basically repeating what we have so far done with the cube, let's imagine placing acoustic sources in the position of the pulpits, from where the chorus used to sing. A listener located under the central dome perceives the sound coming from each direction, reflected by the walls and floor, with decreasing volume and reverberation period (figure 9). Cognitive psychology tells us that our sensory apparatus places a sound source farther away, the smaller it is in terms of sound volume. Going back to San Mark, with the progressive decrease of the reverberation eco , the listener himself, although able to see the choirs playing beside him, is instinctively lead to imagine them moving away, beyond the basilica's walls, beyond those walls which, like mirrors, reflect both the sound and its source. Extending the example, it is as if the whole space of the church expands beyond St. Mark's. Once we place source and perceptor, it is possible to trace, by means of geometry, the location of the reflected sources. The complexity of the space at issue made it necessary to use a software for fluid dynamics calculus. By combining the two systems, it is possible to trace the location of the reflected sources quite exactly, extending the calculation to a high number of reflections. Each point of this diagram (figure 10) one reflected source, i.e. it represents that point in space from where we perceive the sound coming. It is as if the echo within the basilica gradually revealed the existence of an imaginary surface shrouding the listener. Using another metaphor, it is as if sound, coming from countless points, materialized its infinite sources on a fluid and porous looking surface. The reflected sources describe the existence of an imaginary space which, as if it were a field of forces, distorts the perception of actual space. I represented the action of these forces by means of the image of a surface which is free to expand beyond the church's dome, modifying itself as the possible geometrical configurations change. The nature of this distortion is at first connected to a linear language, suggesting the existence of a cause-effect relationship between the acoustic image and the visual image (figure 11). Beside this linear language, another language gradually appears where the fluid lines represent a condition of increasing indeterminacy, due to the fact that, step by step, the acoustic space starts acquiring a probabilistic character. Quoting Edmund Carpenter, “Acoustic space is not a pictorial space, boxed in, but is a dynamic, always in flux creating its own dimension moment by moment without fixed boundaries” [29].
To conclude, the sonic field that surrounds, envelopes, and flows within architecture implicitly embeds architectural space with a new acoustic dimension (figure 12). Starting from a state of abstract geometry, the space turns into a multi-varying dimension: hearing and sight, time and memory contribute to a new definition of image. The construction of reality becomes a subjective experience linked with the sense of hearing, seeing and feeling and also linked with the human being's intimate and deep relationship established with the surrounding environment.
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Figure 7-9. In a lapse of one second, a 1000 cubic metre space is covered by an acoustic ray almost one million times, generating thousands of reflections. The intensity of these reflections diminishes exponentially as time passes, quickly falling below the threshold of audibility. The first reflections are, therefore, those that really determine the perception of an acoustic space and are represented in succession in this diagram. In reality, acoustic space also undergoes, beside deformation, an expansion that has not been represented here. If we compare the original solid and the final solid, it is evident that the figure's vertexes revolved clockwise, shrouding the space around the core, reminding us of the movement of a vortex.
THE REALM OF ANTITHESIS: CONTRADICTION IN PERCEPTIVE PROCESS
A sound's echo dilates during the period of its reflexions a space already existing in the sight of the observer. As a consequence, the observers find themselves between, so to speak, two contradictory realms: an “objective” realm, connected to the sense of sight and conditioned by perspective; an “imaginary” realm created by echo and sound reflexions (figure 13). From the geometric viewpoint, perspective and sound reflexion behave in ways as opposite as the spaces they generate. Perspective tends to compress differences in distance on the line of the horizon [1] ; on the contrary, sound reflexion phenomena prolong the geometrical space in many directions, extending it beyond the horizon of the visible [2]. The situation that comes into being represent a paradox from both the Cartesian (two contradictory linear projections) and a psychological point of view (figure 12). The doubling of space, in fact, triggers a process of internal division: it is as if our cognitive apparatus has to process contradictory data, albeit sensing their common origin [17]. Moreover, anthropologically speaking, the sense of belonging to a space is based on the univocal identification of all the sensory data gravitating around that particular environment [3]. The very principles of logic and Euclidean geometry are known as principles of identity and non-contradiction; in the specific of our example, this means that being in a place excludes being at the same time in another [4] .
The geometry of saint Mark's cathedral, , constitutes an exception to this rule. Let us imagine getting closer to the pillar where the nave and aisles meet. The field of vision, which it dominates broodingly volume of the pillar, clashes with the acoustic field: here, the echo coming from the dome and transepts suggests a depth denied by the pillar's bulk. Distorted by the basilica's architecture, the seen and the heard differ to such an extent that the observer is unable to recognize unambiguously the phenomenon he perceives. It is as if acoustic space and visual space together create a force field so intense that it causes a rupture, a void in the image's unity
In absentia, during perception each sense establishes free connections between those elements of imagination that were previously hidden, generating synaesthesia, and revealing unconscious ties, like those between Saint Mark's and Marghera. Between sight and hearing an unpredictable and unstable world opens, one 'defined by surprise and an unpredictable variation [30]'; a world suspended between disappearance and reappearance, loss and resurfacing. This world corresponds to the extreme transiency of the space perceived by the senses, an opposite one revealed by the senses, by the creative power of the invisible, by the strength of absence and dream.
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Figure 11. Preliminary studies of the representation of reflected sources. The resulting sonic space takes on the features of a cloud of points gathering in limited areas in the space surrounding St. Mark's.
ANTITHESIS AND REWRITING: THE SUBLIME
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Like Kant, in his Critique of Judgement [1], we understand the 'sublime' as the aesthetic value created by the perception of something measureless and immeasurable that generates within us an ambivalent frame of mind. It is exactly the perception of a space shown as limited by our sight, but proven to be immensely vast to our hearing which is ambivalent in this case. On the one hand, we are disappointed because the visual image cannot embrace the sweep of our aural image; on the other hand, we are fulfilled because our consciousness is driven to raise to the idea of an infinity suggested by this boundless acoustic space. The disappointment our imagination suffers the pleasure experienced by our reason, because boundless spaces have the power to evoke inside us through sound the idea of a superior infinity. In this sense, the initial phenomenological dissociation is then recomposed in a dynamic feeling able to transform the subject's physical smallness into a final awareness of spiritual greatness. In other words, becoming aware of the fact that the real sublime is not in the architecture we are looking at with its twofold and ambiguous space [2] but in ourselves, we convert the initial regard for the geometrical objects into a final regard for the subjects, i.e. for the supersensitive and qualified beings that we are. St. Mark's space, like the space of any wide, resonant geometry, is called sublime because it uplifts imagination so that it might represent those cases in which the mind is able to “feel the sublimeness of its destination” [3].Initially depressive, the feeling of the sublime becomes exaltation, and our anguish turns into an active enthusiasm, able to project us beyond the immediacy of the phenomenon, beyond the confines of the geometrical space, and into the experience of pure space.
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NOTES
[1] 1 These notions involve what, with a bow to Friedrich von Shelling, can be called “frozen music,” music that is somehow there but not audible, music whose sounds have been crystallized into the form of measurable visible spaces and solids. The musical ratios are simultaneously geometric relationships, so that the thing that “freezes” music into architecture is geometry [1].
[2] The upper part of the basilica is covered with mosaics laid with the Byzantine technique of hot fusion. Siliceous material was melted and laid in rectangular shapes; while the paste was still red-hot, a gold leaf was applied. After cooling, it was covered by another layer of melted glass to prevent the gold oxidation. Whereas the glassy paste behaves as a perfect mirror to both sound and light, the arrangement of the tesserae creates a rough surface which slightly reduces the wave front intensity, without affecting the composition of its frequencies [3],[4].
[3] Laura Moretti wrote an interesting article [6] about the origin of the salmi spezzati pholyphony. In his travel notes, the Flemish Arent Willemsz offers detailed descriptions of the liturgical ceremonies in St. Mark's basilica during the time of his stay in Venice in 1525. In his account of Vespers, Willelmsz writes: “There is a bench, preciously made, which is placed squarely in the middle of the choir. Here the precentors are sitting, and they alternate with one another, two together alternately intoning the psalms, very pleasantly and magnificently. And they sing splendidly, partly simple song (simplesanck), and partly fabridoen (falsobordone) on the other side; this is altogether very beautiful and magnificient to hear and to see” [5].
[4] Citare Ruskin in Stone of Venice per paragone San Marco grotta marina ed inglese Bartlett
[5] Each geometrical projection establishes, through the sound rays, a biunique correspondence between the Cartesian space and the acoustic space. As already mentioned, a few rays get lost in the cube space, only reaching the listener after thousands of reflections and with a sound intensity close to null. Since the physiology of our aural apparatus allows us to pick up only the sounds above a certain threshold. Some studies [13] [14] demonstrate how, for evolution reasons, our aural apparatus is adjusted to better perceive small differences in sound. Thus, we are more sensitive, both consciously and subconsciously, towards "background sounds," rather than sounds featuring high and distinctive frequencies. In the specific case of this paper, this observation confirms that even almost inaudible reverberations play a key role in the perception of sound phenomena. As mentioned before, many projections - theoretically possible - actually become pointless in terms of phenomenology, since they are impossible to decipher in images. To prevent transforming our imagination into an a-priori geometrical product 5, it is necessary to set a limit beyond which the task of the reflexive projections can be considered concluded. At this point, an extremely fascinating horizon opens before us, because the Cartesian unit that could once describe the basilica's physical space, if considered in terms of sound, becomes a discontinuous system of presence and absence. We find ourselves poised between a literal translation of Euclidean space and the beginning of the indeterminate realm of permanent transiency.
[6] The most illustrious example is possibly the church of Santa Maria in San Satiro, Milan. A space apparently as long as the church's nave is actually 2 m long. Bramante's optical illusion is obtained by physically compressing the intercolumnation's space, according to the geometrical rules of perspective shortening.
[7] This difference can be partially associated to different ways of localizing sounds or objects in space. In fact, as far as visual perception is concerned, we know that the position of a point or the extension of a body in space correspond to the position and extension of the image generated on the retinal surface by that point and body. 'Audition has no such direct representation …apparent sound direction must be derived from the neural representation of the interaural differences in the time of arrival of a sound wave at the two ears and the interaural differences in level of loudness [5]'. Visual space is thus generated by a direct relation between observer and extension of the observed object. Acoustical space instead is generated indirectly by the time gap between the sound directly perceived and the sound reflected by the walls (echo). The geometrical translation of these phenomena similarly features the above mentioned differences: prospective space compresses distant objects along the horizon line, whereas acoustic space expands that very same horizon by virtue of the increasing distance between listener and source.
[8] One significant dimension of life is the human experience of place, which is the major focus of phenomenological work in environment-behaviour research [20]. In philosophy, Casey [18] has written two book-length accounts that argue for place as the central ontological structure founding human experience: "place, by virtue of its unencompassability by anything other than itself, is at once the limit and the condition of all that exists...[P]lace serves as the condition of all existing things...To be is to be in place".
Drawing on Merleau-Ponty [21], Casey emphasizes that place is the central ontological structure of being-in-the-world, partly because of our existence as embodied beings. We are "bound by body to be in place" (1994, p. 104); thus, for example, the very physical form of the human body immediately regularizes our world in terms of here-there, near-far, up-down, above-below, and right-left. Similarly, the pre-cognitive intelligence of the body expressed through action--what Merleau-Ponty called "body subject" embodies the person in a pre-reflective stratum of taken-for-granted bodily gestures, movements, and routines, which is not self-contradictory in nature .
[9] A central focus of phenomenology is the way people exist in relation to their world. In Being and Time, Heidegger [22] argues that, in conventional philosophy and psychology, the relationship between person and world has been reduced to either an idealist or realist perspective. In the idealist view, the world is a function of a person who acts on the world through consciousness and, therefore, actively knows and shapes his or her world. By contrast, the realist view sees the person as a function of the world, in that the world acts on the person and he or she reacts. Heidegger claimed that both perspectives are out of touch with the nature of human life because they assume a separation and directional relationship between person and world that does not exist in the world of actual lived experience. Instead, Heidegger argued that people do not exist apart from the world but, rather, are intimately caught up and immersed in it. There is, in other words, an "undissolvable and coherent unity" between people and the world. This situation always given, never escapable is what Heidegger called Dasein, or being-in-the-world. It is impossible to ask whether people make the world, or the world makes people because both always exist together, and can only be correctly interpreted in terms of the holistic and non-contradictory relationship, being-in-world .
[10] A central focus of phenomenology is the way people exist in relation to their world. In Being and Time, Heidegger [22] argues that, in conventional philosophy and psychology, the relationship between person and world has been reduced to either an idealist or realist perspective. In the idealist view, the world is a function of a person who acts on the world through consciousness and, therefore, actively knows and shapes his or her world. By contrast, the realist view sees the person as a function of the world, in that the world acts on the person and he or she reacts. Heidegger claimed that both perspectives are out of touch with the nature of human life because they assume a separation and directional relationship between person and world that does not exist in the world of actual lived experience. Instead, Heidegger argued that people do not exist apart from the world but, rather, are intimately caught up and immersed in it. There is, in other words, an "undissolvable and coherent unity" between people and the world. This situation always given, never escapable is what Heidegger called Dasein, or being-in-the-world. It is impossible to ask whether people make the world, or the world makes people because both always exist together, and can only be correctly interpreted in terms of the holistic and non-contradictory relationship, being-in-world .
[11] An assessment on part of the subject that, however, does not imply the depreciation of the sensible world, no matter how contradictory and antinomic it is.
[12] Kant, C.G., Intr.,V, pp, 35-9.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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[1] George, L. Hersey, Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2000. See chapter 2: “Frozen music”, pp. 22-52.
[2] George, L. Hersey, The Monumental Impulse. Architecture's Biological Roots, Cambridge, Mass. London, 1999. See chapter 9: “The Biology of Architectural Reproduction”, pp. 167-70.
[3] Tipler P.A., Invito alla fisica, Zanichelli, Bologna 1997. See cap 15-17.
[4] Helmut A.Muller, Principles and Application of Room Acoustic, Lothar Cremer, Bhonn 1994. See 1.1-4.
[5] I. Fenlon, “Strangers in Paradise: Dutchmen in Venice in 1525,” in Music and Culture in Late Renaissance Italy, Oxford, 2002, pp 36-8.
[6] Laura Moretti, “Architectural Spaces for Music: Jacopo Sansovino and Adrian Willaert at St Mark's,” published in Early Music History, Cambridge University Press 2004, Vol. 23, pp. 153-84.
[6b] Otto Demus, The Church of San Marco in Venice : History, Architecture, Sculpture, with a Contribution by Ferdinando Forlati. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Trustees for Harvard University , Washington, 1960.
[7] Jeffrey Kurtzman and Linda Maria Koldau, “Trombe, Trombe d'argento, Trombe squarciate, Tromboni, and Pifferi in Venetian Processions and Ceremonies of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, Vol. 8.1, the University of Illinois, 2002. see chapter 17: “Matteo Pagano's Woodcut of a Ducal procession 1556-59.” The original xylograph 1556-59) are preserved in the Museo Correr in Venice.
[8] Angelo, Gardano, Canto, concerti di Andrea et di Giovanni Gabrieli etc. In Venetia: appresso Angelo Giordano, 1587.
[9] Giovanni, Gabrieli, Sacrae Symphoniae, liber secundus, senis 7-19. Tam vocibus, quam instrumentis. Editio Nova etc.Venetiae: Aere Bartholomei Magni, 1615.
[10] Marin Mersenne, Harmonie Universelle, Contenant la Théorie et la Pratique de la Musique, transl Chapman, R.E., Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands 1957.
[11] AAVV,The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Edition, ed. Stanley Sadie , McMillan, 2000.
[12] Michael John Gorman,: The Angel and the Compass: Athanasius Kircher's Geographical Project, Stanford University Press 2002.
[13] Mannel, Robert, The Perceptual and Auditory Implications of Parametric Scaling in Synthetic Speech, Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, CITTA', Macquarie University, 1994.
[14] Suzuki Aae, James Kozloski, and John D. Crawford, "Temporal Encoding for Auditory Computation: Physiology of Primary Afferent Neurons in Sound-Producing," in The Journal of Neuroscience, July 15, Washington, 2002.
[15] Abbagnano, Nicola, Giovanni Foriero, Filosofi e Filosofie nella Storia, Edizioni Paravia, Torino, 1992. See Vol. II, pg. 228-33.
[16] Cremaschi, S., L'Autonomia Spirituale. La teoria della Mente e delle Passioni in Spinoza, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 1979, See the introduction, pg. XV-XXIII, and chapter 3, pg. 89-94.
[17] Durand, Gilbert, Les structures anthropologiques de l'imaginaire : introduction à l'archétypologie générale, 11e éd. Paris : Dunod , c1992. See the introduction “Convergent Method and Psychologist Methodology”, pp33-41.
[18] Casey, E. S., Getting Back into Place. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993. See pp. 256-289
[19] Rapoport, A., A Critical Look at the Concept `Place', National Geographic Journal of India, 1994, 40, pp 4-19.
[20] Boschetti, M., Staying in Place: Farm Homes and Family Heritage, Housing and Society, 1993, 10, pp 1-16.
[20 b]Casey, E. S. (1997). The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Berkeley: University of California Press.
[21] Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, Humanities Press, New York, 1962.
[22] Heidegger, M., Being and Time, Harper & Row, New York 1962.
[23] L. Pareyson, The Aesthetic in Kant, London Press, London, 1976.
[24] R.Assunto, L'estetica di Emmanuel Kant, Loescher, Torino 1998.
[25] B. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth: New York: Humanities Press, 1995.
[25 b] Heidegger, Environmental Ethics and the Psychology of Perception. New York: Humanities Press 1998. See Chapter V, pp. 156-178.
[26] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, transl. James Creed Meredith, Duquesne, 1790.
[27] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith and with a new preface by Howard Caygill, Palgrave Macmillan, 1929.
[28] Pallasmaa Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: The Architecture and the Senses. Academy Editions, London 1996. pp 34-35
[29] Edmund Carpenter, Eskimo Realities : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York 1973, p 68.
[30] Paul Virilio, The Aesthetic of Disappearance, Semiotext(e), London 1991, pp 22, 23.