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Resonant Spaces, The Sound created by Space and the Space created by Sound

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DOI: 10.48537/hal-03220295

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 Resonant Spaces, The Sound created by Space and the
Space created by Sound
Sofia Balbontin, Mathias Klenner

To cite this version:

Sofia Balbontin, Mathias Klenner. Resonant Spaces, The Sound created by Space and the Space
created by Sound. Proceedings of the 4th International Congress on Ambiances, Alloaesthesia: Senses,
Inventions, Worlds, Réseau International Ambiances, Dec 2020, e-conference, France. pp. 204-209,
�10.48537/hal-03220295�. �hal-03220295�

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204 Resonant Spaces

Resonant Abstract. From the interaction between

sound and space, the dimension of soundspace

Spaces emerges. This research project and its series

of artworks focuses on the æsthetic, and
social aspects of soundspace as a means to
The Sound created create alternative and subjective narratives,
to re-signify and deconstruct the memory of
by Space and the space and the architecture that sustains it.

Space created by The paper revise the concepts of space and

sound in architecture, social sciences and sonic
Sound arts of the 20th century, trying to create a link
between these diverse practices and theories.
Understanding that a major shift in all this
disciplines occurred when sound and space
coalesce. “Resonant Spaces” takes this tradition
an applies to a series of art pieces.

Sofía BALBONTÍN1, Keywords. Soundspace, Architecture,

Mathias KLENNER2 Performance, Critical Spatial Practice

Introduction12
The concept of space has changed in the last century. In social sciences and humanities,
the abstract and geometric space has become social space (Eisenberg, 2015); in music
the space has brought time as the main focus of composition (Pardo, 2017); in the fine
arts through the development of conceptual art, performance and land-art have
revalued the context as the main basis of art work (Rogers, 2013); and in architecture
where the static space of the building becomes dynamic (LaBelle, 2006).
The present research and the series of artworks “Resonant Spaces” are presented as
a resignification, from subjectivity, performance and body, to the symbolic, affective
and representational apparatus of architecture and, finally, to our society.

Sound Lines
Eisenberg (2015) suggests that sound and space are phenomenological and ontologi-
cally intertwined. From his perspective, sound is spatial since the listening process
contains a spatial narrative for each sound. It is almost impossible to imagine sound
without space or space without sound. For Leitner (1978), architect and sound artist,
the soundspace becomes a space in constant transformation, defined by sound itself
and its evolution over time. It becomes necessary to redefine the term ‘space’,
understanding it as a sequence of spatial sensations, that is, a series of temporal
events, where space unfolds in time, is developed, repeated and transformed. Leitner
presents a series of spaces like sculptures of sound built from listening. His objective
is to draw acoustic dynamics to create the sculptural experience of sound (Labelle,
2006). They are sculptures in movement that work in sync with the movement of the

1. Universidad de las Américas – Núcleo de Investigación en Lenguaje & Creación, Chile, [email protected]
2. Universidad de las Américas – Núcleo de Investigación en Lenguaje & Creación, Chile, [email protected]
Body, Culture, Identity 205

listener. Leitner’s legacy affirms that the interaction of sound, space and body creates
new architectures, new soundspaces.

Time in Architecture
The relationship between sound and space, can be understood from acoustics, based
on the long relationship between music and architecture to maintain the sonic fidelity
of spaces for musical performance (Blesser & Salter, 2007). But it was not until the
appearance of the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century and the emergence of what
we call Sonic Arts, that the relationship between sound and space begins to take a
dimension that transcends acoustics to become an instrument for experimentation in
the arts and architecture. One of the first works to establish a new relationship
between sound and space from architecture is the Philips pavilion by Iannis Xenakis
and Le Corbusier, presented at 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Licht (2009) establishes that
both, the tradition of acoustic architecture and sound spatialization were brought
together in the Philips Pavilion. Edgard Varèse’s Poème électronique and Iannis Xenakis’s
Concret PH were reproduced as an installation through 450 speakers. The pavilion
built an architecture of sound that was changing over time and building other spatia-
lities. Pardo (2002) states that geometry and mathematics are the generator of archi-
tecture and of the spatialized movement of sound and even of the composition of
sound pieces in the Pavilion.

Time enters as a new variable that questions the static nature of architecture and
opens up a diversity of design possibilities where the body and subjectivity plays a
leading role. Space is not static anymore; it is in motion.

Spatial Turn
For Eisenberg (2015), the spatiality of sound and its sonorous nature were not fully
integrated by Western culture until the so-called “Spatial Turn” occurred. The Spatial
turn is an intellectual movement that turns to the concepts of place and space in the
social sciences and humanities, specifically, under the idea that space is the context
for the social, and also affects it (Lefebvre, 1974). According to Lefebvre (1974),
space in its definition includes the body, action, energies (sound) and the built envi-
ronment. He demonstrates that space is a social and political phenomenon and not
just an absolute or natural phenomenon (Ouzounian, 2006).

This dialectical and dynamic conception of space is directly related to the processes
occurred in art, music and architecture during the 20th century. Both arts and social
sciences are transformed by this process where space becomes dynamic. Time pene-
trates space and space into time in a subjective condition, where space becomes a
social space in constant change. Sound takes presence as energy that gives shape to
the space in transformation and becomes creative matter for the arts, to declare the
dynamic and social condition of space.

Critical Spatial Practice

Architect and critic Jane Rendell coined the term “critical spatial practice” to refer
to works that cross the limits of art and architecture to engage with both the social
and the æsthetic, and with the public and the private (Rendell, 2006). The term not
only emphasizes the critical, but also the spatial, specifically the spatial aspects of
interdisciplinary practices that operate between art and architecture. Creative prac-
tices and processes that articulate critical responses to contemporary social reality
from space.
206 Resonant Spaces

In the practices of sound resistance, Brandon Labelle (2018) states that sound has the
ability to make the invisible visible, to bring to light discourses that are marginalized
from hegemonic circuits, at the same time, it has the ability to infiltrate the public
space without necessarily being co-opted as the visual image. Taking into account both
resistance practices based on sound and the concept of critical spatial practice, the
present research works between them. Creative practices that operate at the disci-
plinary crosses between art and architecture, working within soundspace critically to
contemporary society.

Sonic Flux and Background Noise

The noise in the history of philosophy and art of the 20th century takes a leading po-
sition, like a murmur that is always there, that forms the basis of our being, from
which shapes and sounds appear (Serres, 1982). Each signal is separated from the
hustle and bustle of silence, noise and silence come together like two sides of the
same coin.

Christoph Cox (2018) raises the idea of ​​“Sonic Flux,” sounds cease to be point ele-
ments and can be understood as part of a continuous and lasting flux. For Sterne
(2012), space is not only a container or a context for action, but it is generative and
always in flux, as well as our perception of it. Would it be possible to speak of a spatial
flux? As Cox (2018) establishes, the sonic flux that is part of space, there is actually a
continuous relationship where space and sound intersect (Saladin, 2014). If space is
dynamic and is also in flux, we can extend Cox’s idea to the concept of soundspace.
Soundspace as a continuous flux that is always in motion, of energy and matter where
all soundspaces coexist.

Listening of Space
Roland Barthes (1993) makes a difference between hearing, as the mere physiological
phenomenon that can be described through acoustics and the physiology of ear, from
listening. Hearing is a passive and receptive act, characterized by a state of alert to
the environment. While listening, also called decoding, is active, it is no longer only
physical, but psychological, it involves the brain, mind and soul, in an interior and
creative act. The artist Pauline Oliveros (2005) starts from Barthes’s premise to define
her practice, called “Deep Listening,” where space and time merges into the concept
of soundspace. Influenced by John Cage, his idea of “Deep Listening” involves listening
to the continuum of sound including its silences, as well as Michel Serres (1982) suggests.

Lucier (2014) describes his work “I am Sitting in a Room,” where he records his own
voice inside a room reciting a speech which is reproduced and re-recorded several
times in the place, until only the resonant frequencies remain. In that piece he makes
a fundamental statement: “performing is more a matter of careful listening than of
making sounds happen.” It is in attentive and deep listening where the force of sound
art resides. The understanding of the world through sound practices changed during
the 20th century, because our way of hearing the world has changed.

Relational Vibrations
Aden Evens (2005) presents sound as a vibration that always remains and never goes
away, only transforms, resonating on the walls of a room forever. Adolf Loos (1912)
affirms that it is not the form of architecture that provides good acoustics but it is its
materials, its walls that for years have modified its molecular structure by vibrations
of good music. For Amacher (1979) the limits of architecture do not end in the walls,
Body, Culture, Identity 207

but go from space through the body, transforming the notion of what it means to in-
habit space. The space becomes inhabiting the body in an active way from vibration
(LaBelle, 2008).

The vibrations going through sound, the body and space are intrinsically relational,
leaving the walls to go through air, connecting bodies, generating air pressure, con-
nections are built. The vibrations destabilize the architecture and also ourselves. In
their relational action, vibrations and resonances build atmospheres and environ-
ments. Jean-Paul Thibaud (2011) states that the environment of a place works as an
energy flux that influences the space and its situational conditions, while at the same
time building a feeling of belonging. The relational condition of soundspace, as a
means through which we build social relationships between humans, non-humans and
architecture itself, promotes a sense of belonging with the built environment.

Performance and the Voice of Space

Rogers (2013) describes the transformation of the concept of space meant for music,
the arts and architecture, going from a geometrical dimension to an ideological and
social one. At the same time, that art began to open up to other expanded fields,
performance became the main component of experimental music. The relationship
between the elements became increasingly important, allowing the context to
became the content (Albers, 1952). As music began to break its obstacles with space,
and art and architecture broke its obstacles with time, they began to converge in a
new space, the space of performance (Rogers, 2013). That can also be understood as
the soundspace.

In 1969, Alvin Lucier presented his piece “I am Sitting in a Room.” Lucier not only
makes the space build sounds specific to its architecture through reverberation, but
also transports a soundspace to a totally different space, that of the auditorium. With
this, what he is doing, through electroacoustic means, is building a space through
sound, at the moment it is reproduced. By perception, we can experience the spatia-
lity of the room where Lucier recorded his piece. The soundspace is not only created
by the acoustics of the room, but also the sound recreates the original space. Jennie
Gottschalk (2016), when referring to the different performance works from experi-
mental music that work with the resonance of spaces, points out a common charac-
teristic that is to fill the space with sound or fill it with sound objects through an
additive process. Saturate it, like the act of filling a container with water.

Resonant Spaces
Based on this theoretical reflection on the evolution of artistic disciplines around
sound and space, we now face our own research project: Resonant Spaces. Using the
tradition of experimental music to fill spaces with sound through action, “Resonant
Spaces” uses vocalizations and percussions with found objects, and slow feedbacks to
take out the voice of space and its resonant frequencies. From the tradition of acoustic
studies, impulse responses and frequency sweeps, as artistic tools, are used to make
the space speak.

The case studies for experimentation are abandoned infrastructures in the margins of
memory and the urban, sublime architectures from wartimes, inhabitable places with
unique and exacerbated acoustics: A Gasometer and a Cooling Tower of an abandoned
power plant in Belgium, a Flood Cistern, a Textile Residual Water Pool and an Air-Raid
Shelter in Catalonia, and two Oil Tanks of the WWII in Scotland, with reverberations
(T60) from 5-80 seconds.
208 Resonant Spaces

As an attempt to converge the thinking of social sciences and sound studies about
space, and the practice of sound spatialization architectures, sound art pieces and
performances, “Resonant Spaces” creates a series of soundspace artworks: a docu-
mentary called “Resonant Spaces Research”3, a performance and installation series
called “Resonant Spaces #14, #25 and #36,” and an LP that gathers all the sounds
experimentations “Espacios Resonantes”7.

Conclusions
Artists, musicians, architects and thinkers from social sciences during the 20th century,
have opened up the notions of space and sound, not only as geometrical, physical or
abstract dimensions, but as resonant spheres (Dewey, 1934) where the world can be
experienced and understood in its social and relational dimension. In this sense, the
body appears as a direct link between sound, space and the memory of place.

The performance and the presence of body in space builds a subjective and unique
gaze, which is capable to reconstruct space, architecture and memory. The back-
ground noise is open, to give rise to the soundspace flux, from its original history as
architectures, until today as opportunities for artistic action. Performances that
generates a third space, where the public is part of the sound experience and their
bodies intervene in the perception of the sounds that travel through speakers.

“Resonant Spaces” was developed as a story that tried to join diverse disciplines and
traditions around sound and space. Through an active listening of soundspaces, our
perception allows us to think about possible new critical spatial and sonic practices.

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