Seed Media Group: Blog
Sunday, October 25, 2009 • Events • by Eva Wisten • #
Why you feel like falling
It was one of those talks - someone comes in and shows a bunch of slides of things you are familiar with: The Bird’s Nest Stadium, the Sydney Opera House, Tate Modern, but the stories they tell are from such a different angle, that you feel like for the first time, you see them in color.
Raj is head of Arup Acoustics. At the heart of his talk was this: Acoustics is architecture and architecture is acoustics. Every detail in a space, down to the shape of the light switch, will absorb, reflect, or diffuse sound.
Raj talked about how the approach from Arup is to think of architecture from the inside out: how do people behave, how do they perceive things, what are their needs. In the process of realizing a building, this is balanced against the architect approach of viewing architecture from the outside in – the building in relation to its environment.
And here are some other pieces of stories that came up during the presentation:
How with cave paintings by early man, the best drawings are always found in the parts of the caves with the best resonance, alluding to an early relationship between art and music….
....How cutting an apple inspired Arup-founder Ove Arup in the process of building the Sydney Opera House and made him realize that you can construct the curved shells out of straight line radii of a sphere.
...How the soundscape of cities in America are much louder today than in Europe where, thanks to noise legislation for building and transport design, sound levels haven’t risen since the mid 1970’s…
...And how when Arup collaborated with artist Stephen Vitiello on “The smallest of Wings”, his geodesic dome structure over the Broadgate Arena in London, and infused the structure with the beating of moth wings and the buzzing of humming birds, flocks of birds would arrive to listen to the show, then disappear when the sounds stopped…
Raj was also touching on the very now and some roads the field of acoustics may explore in the future.
How at the SoundLab at Arup you can simulate the acoustics of any piece of architecture, real or imagined.
A few new projects: A 3D recording of the audio edition of Nick Cave’s new novel, a live recording of Lou Reed that actually sounds like the real thing.
How there are countless visual illusions but only five known auditory illusions. But could the few auditory illusions that do exist be manifested through architecture to add flair to a building?
Raj also explained the reason why we sometimes feel like we’re falling just when we fall asleep. When we are awake, we know where we are in the world because our brains and eyes register the distance relative to your feet. When you fall asleep, your brain cuts of your visual cortex and now relies solely on auditory input. Sometimes there’s a gap in the handover between the senses, and you think that you just lost your position in the world.