Does the sound of a lost building reside in the space that it once inhabited? Could a sonic record reveal both the past and present spatial voice and, if so, how or what do we hear? Can one perceive a “voice”, an energetic resonance of what was, as if signalling a code for the proportion, volume, materiality and mass of what has been there? Can this sonic record be coloured by patterns of occupation and habits of use, textured through the grain of time? What happens to the space once the building and its sound is removed: is a void created, or does the surrounding sound seep into that uninhabited location, remaining as a hum or the faintest echo? When a new mass replaces the old architectural form, do pleats of surplus sound drape and fold around it, or does sound mutate to inhabit the recreated space? This is the subject of a silent dialogue.
Composed from sampled sounds from the immediate locality of Marsham Street, [Space in Sound] explores space and time within the auditory environment. Created primarily from twenty-four hour sonic maps, that stream the blended noise into different temporal and spatial characters, the map becomes a score to reframe the act of memory with which we can locate and recognise spatial events. The shape, dimensions and reverberation qualities are then explored and extended via splicing and looping, to amplify space and distance, giving rise to a flux of sound inflections that move from foreground to background. Whilst suspending the listener within its gyrational scape, the work poses the question: what are the ways space, sound and memory cognitively tied, and can such ties be reinterpreted to create states of reverberation where everything continues to exists once the building and its sounds are removed?
Performed at Ching’s Yard: Architectural Association, 2000.
Architectural Voices: Listening to Old Buildings, 2008.