The Silenced Listener: Architectural Acoustics, the Concert Hall and the Conditions of

Audience
Author(s): Lewis Kaye
Source: Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 22, Acoustics (2012), pp. 63-65
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23343812
Accessed: 23-05-2018 08:28 UTC

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 The Silenced Listener: Architectural
Acoustics, the Concert Hall and the
Conditions of Audience

Lewis Kaye
ABSTRACT

The author considers the

relationship between archite
ture, acoustics and audience.
The author proposes we think
audience in a more active sen

A and attend to conditions of a

ence. This dynamic approach
JL JLcoustically architected space resounds in ity [2]. For example, the British demonstrates how changes
in architecture designed for
a very social manner, its physical conditions technologically acoustician Hope Bagenal and his
sound both are related to soci
manipulated to resonate and reverberate in ways that are as colleague Godwin Bursar found changes in practices of listen
culturally implicit as they are materially audible. When consid that changes to interior church ar and influence how people com
ering such space, the goal is the optimization of the moment, chitecture after the Lutheran Ref to experience sound. Such an
generally the collective moment, of aural experience. Funda ormation, specifically those to the approach reveals contempor
acoustic architecture as biase
mental to this is not only how architectural acoustics techni Thomaskirche in Leipzig, were not
toward music as spectacle,
cally manages sonic qualities such as reverberation but also merely aesthetic but reflective of a with conditions of audience th
how it organizes bodies in space. Spatial organization involves broader social and cultural shift in demand a silenced and attent

what we are supposed to listen to and how we are supposed the relationship between church listener.

to listen: We are to attend to music performed onstage in a and community:

focused, attentive and silent manner. Beneath such assump
The encroachment of galleries and
tions are the social relations of musical spectacle. The modern
boxes [on previously open cathedral
concert hall, as an exemplar of acoustically architected space, and church spaces] . . . was due to the Lutheran system of gov
physically frames a persistent, idealized and hegemonic prac ernment, which placed the church under the town council. But
tice of listening by the way it organizes sound as spectacle. It it also showed the importance and popularity of the church as
allows for a concept of audience as a passive and objectified a building, and we must remember that it created the acoustic
conditions that made possible the seventeenth century develop
mass of consumers. In other words, acoustic architecture, by ment of Cantata and Passion. The building became in fact a kind
specifically setting out to materially organize the moment of of religious opera house [3].
aural experience in a very particular way, comprises an en
Bagenal and Bursar thus implicitly raise the question of how
semble of technological practices that constitute very specific
social and historical conditions of audience. changes in architectural form not only created the acoustic
conditions
This notion of audience differs from that generally found in necessary for the development of new musical
forms but also how these acoustic conditions reflected new so
communication studies or media sociology, where audience is
cial values about how we should experience sound. In essence,
typically thought of as an objectified entity. Their commonsen
sical notion ascribes a label to a group of people sharing what
a comthey are referring to here are new conditions of audience
and demands for a new way of socially experiencing sound.
mon media experience [ 1 ]. There is certainly an architectural
connotation here in that such shared experience necessarily This idea of a religious opera house prefigured a later at
requires some level of spatial organization, but it is onetentiveness
more to secular music as a spectacle demanding rever
ence, as discussed by Jonathan Crary in his assessment of the
implied than explicit. Absent is any conscious consideration
of the actual material conditions of the moment of experi Bayreuth Festspielhaus, designed by Richard Wagner and ar
ence and the implications these conditions might have chitect
for Gottfried Semper and built in the mid-1870s [4]. While
primarily
the experience itself. By attending to the specific architectural concerned with visual practices, Crary nonetheless
and spatial conditions that frame the experience of sound, acknowledges sound and aurality in a way that actually helps
we get past a static understanding of audience to one that dissolve
is conceptual boundaries between different forms of
more dynamic and variable: We move away from thinking sensory
of experience. The very nature of spectacle necessarily
involves
an or the audience to thinking about conditions of audience. the coordinated organization of various sensory ele
We no longer simply presume an audience's shared experi ments. Drawing as one might expect on Guy Debord, Crary
argues:
ence but rather focus attention on the socially and historically
inflected patterns through which such experience comes to
Spectacle is not primarily concerned with looking at images but
be organized. rather with the construction of conditions that individuate, im
The relationship between architecture, musical form and mobilize, and separate subjects, even within a world in which
the social relations of church music highlight this variabil mobility and circulation are ubiquitous. In this way, attention
becomes key to the operation of noncoercive forms of power.
This is why it is not inappropriate to conflate seemingly different
optical or technological objects: they are similarly about arrange
Lewis Kaye (educator), Department of Communication Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, ments of bodies in space, techniques of isolation, cellularization,
Waterloo ON, 75 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G5, Canada. E-mail: and above all separation. Spectacle is not an optics of power but
clewiskaye ©sympatico. ca>, <lkaye@wlu. ca>. an architecture [5].

©2012ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 22, pp. 63-65,2012 63

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 Applied to sound, Crary's "spectacle" hall is an exemplar of an architecturally
He notes a shift away from instrumental
foregrounds the relationship between organized and acoustically optimized training toward the "appreciation" of
contemporary musical performance and space that privileges the performer.
professionally performed music now
what are nothing less than architectural The design of a typical concert halleasily
is accessible through phonograph
techniques of social control. Acoustics is, in principle no different from thatrecordings,
of a change that ultimately
of course, one such technique. In other helped reify divisions between profes
Bayreuth, the only significant difference
words, the architectural acoustics of spec sional and amateur musicians.
being what is physically onstage [8]. With
few exceptions, modern musical perfor
tacle directly involve the organization of Architectural acoustics helped concret
conditions of audience. mance is intended as both an aural and
ize, to borrow a concept from Christian
Wagner was interested in creating visualspec spectacle, designed to grabNorberg-Schulz
and [12], these new aural
tacles that would completely subsume hold
the attention at both levels. It is a relations,
goal reinforcing cultural attitudes
experiencing subject. His demand for a
so obvious that the principal technologi
toward music that stressed a particular
high degree of attention from his cal audi practice that underpins the design understanding
of of quality, authenticity
ences guided all aspects of the design modern
of concert halls is rarely ever and
questhe authority of the professional
his opera house. To focus attention tioned.
on These conditions emphasizecomposer
at and musician. Architecturally
what was transpiring onstage, he hidtentive the listening by effectively silencing
speaking we might say the home became
orchestra from public view, a decision listeners. a space to either dabble or consume
that had the effect of leaving "the source Such conditions result in the treat while the acoustically optimized concert
of the music unidentifiable and hence ment of audience members as passive hall became the proper venue for the ex
mystified" [6]. The sound was meant units
to of absorptive mass. Leo Beranek, perience of the spectacle of profession
envelop the audience and emotionally one of the foremost contemporary ac
ally performed music.
empower the visual narrative unfolding ousticians, and his colleague Takayuki Practices of architecture, particularly
onstage. Music and architecture Hidaka thus have quantified the acoustic as theyefpertain to the formal organization
worked in support of visual spectacle, fect of audience members by compar of spaces for sound, are intimately bound
producing an intense and authoritative ing the absorptive qualities of human up with the practices of listening they fos
aesthetic experience. The design of beings
the to that of variously upholstered
ter. Acoustic architecture, in particular,
Bayreuth Festspielhaus also incorporated chairs [9]. Even the differential influ produces very controlled conditions of
other fascinating and salient socialence feaof seasonal clothing is taken into audience predicated on the idea of spec
tures. For example, Semper account, as audiences in the winter tend tacle. As the 18th-century Italian phi
to wear more clothing than those in thelosopher and art critic Count Francesco
summer. Measurements showed the ab
placed the audience on one single "class Algarotti longed for, the modern concert
less" level, a feature anticipated by Wag
sorption coefficient for a full audience hall has become a "rationally designed
ner himself... [building] community by
sitting in medium-upholstered chairs theater
to that... no longer constitute [s] 'a
leveling the tiers of the traditional the
be
ater, erasing class difference, and creat quite close to that of an empty place
audito destined for the reception of a tu
rium with fully upholstered chairs. multuous
ing a "mystic gulf' between the audience While assembly, but as the meeting of
and the stage [7], perhaps a sensible approach foraacoussolemn audience'" [13]. Yet what if we
were
ticians, as it aids in the prediction to turn the count's idea on its head?
and
As with the Thomaskirche, new ideas development of models of how sound By considering the conditions of audi
about social relations contributed to new will propagate inside a concert hall,
encethe
and the aural relations of spectacle
architectural forms, new ways of socially very idea that human beings are placed
present in the modern concert hall, we
experiencing sound and hence new con on the same level as pieces of furniture
also raise the question of how we might
ditions of audience. seems quite troubling from a sociological organize and configure space differently
The example of the Bayreuth perspective.
Festspiel so as to produce new conditions of au
haus reminds us that what is hidden from Architectural acoustics, and the condi dience and aural relations. Examples of
tions of audience it propagates, resounds
view is as important as what is visible and this, in fact, abound.
that the arrangement of bodies in space with notions of the mass audience as a Brian Eno's brilliant Ambient series of

is tantamount to the social organization passive group of receivers. The linear records is a notable example of music
of the physical conditions through which model of communication implicitly designed
as for nontraditional spaces and
those bodies come to hear. By hiding the sumed by science and engineering listeningtreats experiences and could be said
orchestra, Wagner made a specific and asymmetrical power relations as to cultivate nontraditional conditions of
a cul
conscious choice about how the sound tural norm. Moreover, this model and audience.
its In the liner notes to Ambient
was to be experienced. Putting a musicalvalues are present in related media1:prac
Music For Airports, Eno states, "Ambi
performer onstage in front of a group tices of ent Music must be able to accommo
such as broadcasting and recorded
people involves no less a decisionmusic. about Emily Thompson correctlydate con many levels of listening attention
the nature of sonic experience, albeit nected the emergence of architectural
without enforcing one in particular; it
one that today seems mostly to beacoustics
taken in the U.S.A. at the beginning
must be as ignorable as it is interesting"
for granted. Just as Wagner's choice of mys [14], We can hear other transformative
the 20th century and a concomitant
tified the source of the music, what ourin the culture of listening toward
shift approaches in practices ranging from
current hegemonic form of musical the per
consumption of professionally sound
perinstallation to electronic media
formance hides, and indeed mystifies, formed music [10], noticing a shiftart [15], Nevertheless, such exceptions
fos
is its own conditions of audience. With seem
tered by the emergence of a range of newto prove the rule that traditional
some variability, this type of stagedsound
per musical
technologies. Similarly, Mark Katz performance, and the practice
formance is the generally accepted writes
and about how the domestication of of architectural acoustics, tends toward
the phonograph influenced U.S. musical
unquestioned model of Western musical privileging a single, well-defined source
education in the early 20th centurytransmitted
performance today. The modern concert [11]. to an undifferentiated mass

64 Kaye, The Silenced Listener

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of passive, silenced consumers. This at
titude is still deeply embedded in con
temporary culture; it is built into our
movie theaters, our living rooms and, of
course, our concert halls. Modern acous
tics has merely elevated such conditions
of audience to the status of scientific
ritual.
14. Brian Eno, Ambient 1: Music for Airports, LP, US
3. Hope Bagenal and Godwin Bursar, "Bach's Music
Editions
and Church Acoustics," Journal of the Royal Institute of EG, EGS-201 (1978).
British Architects 37', No. 5 (11 January 1930) p. 157.
15. See, e.g., Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise:
Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum,
4. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention,
Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: 2006).
MIT My own site-specific sound art leans in this
Press, 1999). direction, seeking to blur distinction between what
is composed, and hence to be listened to, and what
5. Crary [4] p. 74-75. is there and thus will be heard. See You Are Here, com
6. Crary [4] p. 251. missioned as the official MP3 audio guide for To
ronto's first Nuit Blanche art event in 2006 at: <www.
7. Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe, Crimes of
ccca.ca/nuitblanche/nuitblanche2006/artists/dl.
Art + Terror, (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press,
html>.

Acknowledgments 2003) p. 14.

8. The social stratification of audience sections, how
Many thanks to the reviewers of this paper. Their
ever, is an architectural feature that has certainly re Manuscript received 2January 2012.
thoughtful comments and insightful criticisms on an
turned to the modern concert hall.
earlier draft contributed much to the final product.
9. Leo L. Beranek and Takayuki Hidaka, "Sound Ab
Lewis Kaye is a Toronto-based sound artist, me
sorption in Concert Halls by Seats, Occupied and
References and Notes Unoccupied, and by the Hall's Interior Surfaces," dia sciences researcher and educator. Currently
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 104, No. 6, an instructor in the Department of Commu
1. Vincent Mosco and I have argued that the schol
3169-3177 (1998). nication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier Univer
arly usage of the term audience in the field of com
munication studies traces back to the influence of 10. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Ar sity, he studies and teaches on the relationship
commercial broadcasters and their desire to assess chitectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in Amer between technology, space and aurality, digi
ica, 1900-1930 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
the demographic characteristics of radio listeners. tal culture and the materiality of media art.
See Vincent Mosco and Lewis Kaye, "Questioning the
11. Mark Katz, "Making America More MusicalHis most recent major artwork is Through
Concept of the Audience," in I. Hägen and J. Wasko,
through the Phonograph, 1900-1930," Americanthe Vanishing Point, a sound installation
eds., Consuming Audiences? Production and Reception in
Music 16, No. 4, 448-475 (1998).
Media Research (Cresswell, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000). based on the work of Marshall McLuhan, ex
12. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space & Ar hibited at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin
2. See, e.g., Peter Vergo, That Divine Order: Music and
chitecture (New York: Praeger, 1971). and the Centre Culturel Canadien in Paris
the Visual Arts from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century
(New York: Phaidon, 2005). 13. Thompson [10] p. 46. in 2011.

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