Close your eyes wherever you are, and you may become aware of the aural complexity of the space you’re in. The acoustics, distant sounds of play or belligerence, nature or machinery form a constellation of environmental cues we unconscious incorporate into our sense of a place.
We live in a world which privileges sight, playing on a Western philosophical heritage that scopes out and objectifies the world. While sight affords us a voyeuristic viewpoint separated from the world (could we feel so detached if we could see 360 degrees around us?), sound envelopes us.
Research in the emerging field of acoustical archaeology suggests that ancient temples were designed with sound strongly in mind, and certainly many of them – such as the Chichen Itza in Central Mexico – exhibit extraordinary acoustic qualities. However, contemporary Architecture seems to be driven by an occularcentrism; still no acoustic modelling in architectural packages, while an architecture student friend is told by her lecturer that they work exclusively in the “graphic realm”.
I recently met up with a sound professional turned researcher, Mark Ward, at a conference on interactive entertainment (IE2009). Mark acknowledged the under-appreciated nature of sound, even in cinematographic sound design, and is working to advance the body of knowledge on sound, immersion, and emotion. Of particular interest to me is Mark’s overview of Impulse Response analysis. Impulse Response effectively captures the acoustic signature of a space, by examining the way sounds echo around it. For sound production this means an arbitrary sound can be modelled very accurately as it would sound within the space. For architectural applications this allows a high-quality, cheap, and standard way of recording and archiving the acoustic qualities of a location.
You’re right. Acoustics seems to have been forgotten in Architecture since the event of electronic amplifiers… except in certain obvious examples: Sydney Opera House springs to mind. This leads to some genuinely uncomfortable places. There’s a great Bar near me built in a converted paintworks. My biggest problem with it is that the high ceilings and steel and concrete construction make the acoustics AWFUL. Where’s the point in sitting down with friends, a board game, a beer and a pizza if you can’t hear each other talk? Acoustics only ever seem to be addressed during conversions…
The Opera House itself may have been designed with acoustics in mind, but in actual use I’ve been witness to some horrific set-ups. The Ben Folds show was a packed out 360 degree seating situation, but seemed to be exclusively played through two PA speakers next to the sound desk.
Also: sitting down with friends, a board game, a beer and a pizza sounds like a worthy past-time. There is a fantastic Japanese board-game cafe here in Sydney where they have a menu a hundred or so different games available to play; good fun!
i think you have a point, in terms of creating spaces with optimal sound quality, there seems to be still a lot of work to be done, and yeah our opera house is pretty shameful in terms of accoustics. its kinda weird when you think about it coz archies are trained to think about the opposite problem: noise (though they seem to get it wrong quite often as well, eg. the new scitech library at usyd, its meant to be a library but it sounds like a meatmarket. seems to be coz its ceilings are too low, too much bare concrete, not enough softer, more absorbant materials like carpets etc, oh and also should mention open plan houses incl bedrooms, look really amazing but can be pretty horrible to live in if youre not the only one at home…) So sound insulation is a pretty big industry, and in japan, quite often, its the only kind of insulation a house will have (kinda crazy when you think about how cold it gets over there)….
just had a question about the modelling systems, would they be able to predict how absorbant each of the materials are? once i was in a bar or somewhere that had loads of ppl, but they seemed to have these foam cushiony panels on the walls that seemed to absorb the noise quite well, so theres stuff like that the program would have to factor in as well.
I don’t know of any sound modelling systems specifically for architectural purposes. The Impulse Response analysis is just for recording the actual dynamics of the room, but wouldn’t let you do much other than throw undistorted sounds at it and hear how they’d sound in that particular room.
Some of the research we have been doing for Real-Time Porosity has been using the Crysis Engine (a recent computer game 3D graphics engine) to play around with architecture and structural dynamics. Obviously this is the sort of thing the engine is good at doing; modelling weighted bodies operating under realistic physics. It also does it with close-to photo-realistic results. (It also has an advantage over standard architectural visualization tools in that the first-person active agent is fundamental to engagement with the environment. Everything is “seen” from a human perspective, walking or running around the space.)
Crysis does not have very sophisticated acoustic simulation, but it looks like a new game engine (Frostbite, for the upcoming Battlefield Bad Company 2) does. One of the sound engineers developing it has written an article on their technology. The sound has been described by early testers as “too good” and “awesome”. Assuming this engine models the material absorption and reflection, this could be a great tool for simulation.
There is no reason why this couldn’t technically be done. I can imagine using the same principle as ray tracing,where each ray of light is simulated as it bounces off some materials, is distorted through others, and gets defracted.
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