"Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, wheras sound is omni-directional."(p.49) That makes me wonder how your architecture would sound. Pallasmaa expresses how a building must also be understood as a speaker to its people. How does your building sound? Like a "drip of water in a cavern.." or like "a siren in the city". How does your building sound? I would like to think that different spaces would voice differently. Lobbies would be drenched in reverb and echoing materials. Libraries would need to be soft, padded tones that limit noise. Theatres would be a middle ground of warm tones with hints of reverb. But my question should go deeper than what your building actually sounds like, rather, how does your building make you feel through sound? What if you switched your idea of having a loud lobby to a vacuum and the sound was absorbed so much you could barely even hear your footsteps? That would cause a very different reaction.
Pallasmaa also expresses that a visual connection is an act of your eye "reaching" (p.49) where your ear "receives" sound. I feel like sound does and can consume you. How does your building sound?
I appreciate this concept that difference spaces should sound differently in actual sound sense, but i am also intrigued by how the building sounds in a conceptual sense. I recently watched a program on Sythesia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia). This program focused on people who hear colors, and see sounds. Scientists believe that they actually have extra connections in their brains which cause them to experience something in two different ways. For example one of the subjects of the story expressed these differences through art to try and explain herself. If you asked a Synesthete what your building sounded like you might get the conceptual answer you were looking for. This disorder seems to me, to directly link to how we as designers try to percieve the world, not as it is, but as what it could represent. Our task is to make that representation visible others. Or is it?
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