Cultural Synesthesia
Analogies of Eye and Ear in Architectural and Music Theory
Originally published in Wolkenkuckucksheim / Cloud-Cuckoo-Land — International
Written by Jürgen Strauss
Journal for Architectural Theory Volume 18, Issue 31 — 2013
Rules and the Senses
On a metaphysical or ideological foundation, within historically definable cultural spaces, the worlds of imagination belonging to the arts and sciences become linked with the requirements of political and social everyday life, so that for the actors involved the impression arises that a homologous convergence of the normatively desirable with what is causally given can now be shaped. Under these conditions, rule-based poetics emerge which, as cultural synesthesias, designate generally applicable principles of design and can in fact achieve a high degree of aesthetic authority. For the duration of their validity, a characteristic aesthetic condition arises: in perception, conceptions dominate over sensations. In European art history this is represented above all by the various classicisms; by the theologically and ideologically shaped architectures of representation and state power, together with their corresponding church and state music; and, in the present, by the mass-media-staged fashions of building and music-making.
Removed from the socially central status of a prevailing rule-based poetics, however, seemingly deviant perceptions of music and architecture also appear. In them, one’s own sensation begins to dominate over the general conception, thereby unfolding a sensual and critical potential that can lead to new forms of analogy and corresponding design concepts.
For the German-speaking world, examples of this include Johann Gottfried Herder’s Fourth Critical Grove (1769), Goethe’s essay On German Architecture (1772), and also — with regard to the whole aesthetic and sociopolitical context — Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes (1837).
Ear and Number — Eye and Line
In De re aedificatoria — completed in 1452 and published in 1485 — Leon Battista Alberti presents the analogically derived connection between ear and eye as follows:
“The form, dignity, and beauty of buildings is to be determined, as with animals, from the parts of the body, from which the quality of symmetry proceeds, just as the numbers of nature are based upon the relationship between equal and unequal musical voices and tones.”¹
And further:
“Beauty is a kind of agreement and consonance of the parts into a whole, carried out according to a certain number, a particular relationship, and arrangement, as symmetry — that is, the most perfect and highest law of nature — demands.”²
With the expressions “beauty,” “symmetry,” “agreement,” and “consonance,” Alberti refers to the central conceptual figure of harmonic thought: cosmos, nature, and human beings are formed according to a unified plan of divine reason, of a coherent logos.
Things may be changeable, turbulent, and dissonant in the sublunary sphere of the bodily earth — but in the whole of the cosmos, well-formedness prevails in the long term. Adaptation to, or fitting into, this well-formedness is the aim of artistic production, whether as architecture or as music.
Alberti makes the source of his concept of nature explicit:
“The law of relationship is best taken from those phenomena in which, according to our perception and knowledge, nature allows herself to be contemplated and admired by us. And indeed I repeatedly confirm the saying of Pythagoras: it is completely certain that nature remains the same in everything. So it is. The numbers, however, which bring about that symmetry of voices so pleasant to the ears, are the same numbers which cause our eyes and our inner being to be filled with a wonderful feeling of well-being.”³
First, it must be noted that nature itself is imagined as unchanging and therefore eternal. Alberti here represents a fixed ontology of self-identical being, as developed not only by Pythagoras, but also by Parmenides and later by Plato and Plotinus. This stands in opposition to the ideas of Heraclitus, Epicurus, and their successors, who understand change and transformation as essential features of cosmos, nature, and human beings.
The particular charm of a fixed ontology, however, lies in the fact that it enables, among other things, the Roman idea of empire and the Christian idea of order: legitimacy and cultural success through the architectural representation of planned insight into divine reason.
For the princely courts of Alberti’s time, competing with one another, an architecture thus becomes tangible that makes visible the highest legitimacy through adaptation to universal magnitudes encompassing times and spaces.
On what basis does Alberti carry out the analogy between eye and ear, and in what does the comparability of the achievements of both senses consist? In sequence, he mentions the “phenomena” themselves, our “perceptions and knowledge” of them, and he refers to a special capacity shared by both senses — they are able to be filled “with a wonderful feeling of well-being.” In other words: on the level of appearances, eye and ear are capable, through perception and knowledge, of gaining insight into the well-formed constitution of architecture and music.
But what guarantees the stability of this insight into the well-formed, the comparability of both senses, and the possibility of planning correspondingly formed works?
It is numbers, and the proportional relations of whole numbers, through which the book of nature was written by divine reason. Thus it is not the appearances or perceptions of the well-formed themselves that establish comparability, but rather the conception — and corresponding knowledge — of a proportional numerical order underlying nature.
Alberti understands the kinship between the senses of eye and ear on the basis of Pythagorean metaphysics — a noetics of harmony — mediated through Plato’s Timaeus and Plotinus’ Enneads. In art-historical terms, this represents a rather conservative moment, one that had also persisted through the medieval educational structure of the quadrivium. The ear “counts” the beats or vibrations of tones, while the eye compares or measures lines; arithmetic and geometry unite within conceptions of proportionality and thereby become capable of grounding universally naturalized concepts of beauty for ear and eye alike. Here we encounter the enormously influential cultural synesthesia of eye and ear within European history. Its traces appear not only in the theories of harmony and proportion within music — from Boethius to Schönberg — and architecture — from Vitruvianism to Le Corbusier — as forms of rule-based poetics, but also in cosmology (sphere harmony / harmonia mundi), medicine (humoral pathology), and theories of the state (mos maiorum, monarchy).
But how do eye and ear actually relate with regard to their sensual foundations?
Is there, in the seeing of colors or forms, anything corresponding to acoustic consonance as the embodiment of well-formedness?
And more fundamentally: is the perception of acoustic consonance and dissonance truly the universal foundation of all well-formed music?
From today’s perspective, the answer is easy: no.
Consonance and dissonance presuppose a division and quantification of the continuous field of audible sound — a cultural achievement of Greek music theory — which encourages us to imagine one or more systems of discrete sound elements, of individual separated tones. At the same time, both the development of European music and comparison with non-European traditions demonstrate that the perception of what is pleasing is subject to considerable fluctuation.
Is a tritone interval — an extreme dissonance — musically usable?
Can the striking of a bell become part of symphonic music?
Can melismatic singing be pleasing?
Today: yes.
But, one might object, do we not possess proof of an inner — even aesthetic — connection between the two senses in the everyday expressions “tone color” and “color tone”? No, because both concepts are based upon ideas derived from a physical analysis of the spectra of sound and light, and not upon a theory of the perception of sound and color.
Newton’s optics explicitly excludes the peculiarities of perception; it seeks only to describe relations between objects. Goethe’s theory of colors, by contrast, takes active operations of the visual sense into account. It becomes evident that the spectral concept of sounds — as developed by Helmholtz — and of colors represents a late and scientifically significant consequence of harmonic thought, and must by no means itself be naturalized.
That we today speak casually of “tone color” — as a dimension of sound distinct from pitch and loudness — also results from the fact that Helmholtz’s ideas, particularly the spectral concept, prevailed historically. Earlier descriptions of this domain of phenomena, however — for example Rousseau’s “timbre” or Herder’s “tone color” — correspond only partially, or not at all, with Helmholtz’s concept of tone color. Helmholtz idealizes the conditions. Missing from his conception are, among other things: aperiodic signal components, binaurality, and the active operations of the auditory sense itself.
The fact that sounds and colors can be quantified does not mean that their nature consists of numbers and proportional relations. Galileo’s more geometrico, and its connection with arithmetic in Leibniz’s functional theory, constitutes an analytical instrument of physics — not nature itself, nor its essence.
Critique of Rule-Based Poetics
Let us now turn toward the historically articulated critiques of theories of proportion and harmony, for through them a completely different analogy between eye and ear is initiated — one grounded in sensually comprehensible experience and systematically based upon the perception of localizable events and enveloping space. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that Alberti himself takes worldly reality into account — actual column masses, acoustic problems with vaulted spaces, contingencies arising during construction, and so forth. Yet on the level of design he insists upon the rational unity of the architectural plan and thereby upon the ideal exclusion of accidental influences.
In contrast to conceptions of ideal architectural worlds, the utopias of early modern authors present seemingly contradictory forms of “science fiction,” for these authors now proceed from the contemporary state of physics and technology and extend it into the fantastic. They mark the turning point in the effort to make a metaphysically conceived world order effective within worldly reality — to subject it to an experimental rationalization capable of enabling an increased technical utilization of nature.
In the field of acoustical technology, Francis Bacon presents in Nova Atlantis (1627) an acoustical laboratory concerned both with questions of the minute division of the audible tonal range and with the construction of devices for transmitting sound across large distances. Cyrano de Bergerac’s Journey to the Moon (1657) — describing a strongly auditory-oriented people among whom the young rule over the old — clearly reveals an anti-Cartesian attitude associated with the epistemological elevation of sensuality in general, and here specifically of hearing.
The monism intended to overcome Descartes’ dualism of body and mind is carried out here from the side of the senses themselves: mind becomes bound once again to sensuality. Bergerac’s inhabitants of the moon possess mechanical audiobooks so small that they can hang them from their ears and continue educating themselves while listening wherever they go.
After generations of Renaissance Vitruvianism, Claude Perrault criticizes the harmonic foundations of ideal proportions in Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes selon la méthode des anciens (1683).
He advances several arguments:
The ancients themselves did not proportion according to unified rules — this is demonstrated through measurements of classical columns regarded as exemplary within rule-based poetics. The perception of well-formedness depends upon the viewer’s standpoint and upon the architectural surroundings of the columns. And finally, the analogy between eye and ear is inadmissible because nothing visually comparable exists to the harmonic effect of consonance in acoustics.
Perrault writes:
“From this it follows that what pleases the eye is not grounded in proportion if the eye does not know it, which is usually the case.”⁵
Pleasure in seeing therefore remains restricted to the recognition of something already known. Thus pleasurable perception becomes tied to professional knowledge familiar with the rules — while the layperson is called upon to educate himself.
What is established here for architecture also applies to large portions of classical musical composition oriented around particular rules of harmony. On the level of the score — visually and spatially accessible as a flat surface — many compositions appear as refined works of rational combinatorics. Yet the listener, hearing alone and without knowledge of the score, is often unable to perceive these harmonic subtleties.
In contrast to conceptions of ideal architectural worlds, the utopias of early modern authors present seemingly contradictory forms of “science fiction,” for these authors now proceed from the contemporary state of physics and technology and extend it into the fantastic. They mark the turning point in the effort to make a metaphysically conceived world order effective within worldly reality — to subject it to an experimental rationalization capable of enabling an increased technical utilization of nature.
In the field of acoustical technology, Francis Bacon presents in Nova Atlantis (1627) an acoustical laboratory concerned both with questions of the minute division of the audible tonal range and with the construction of devices for transmitting sound across large distances. Cyrano de Bergerac’s Journey to the Moon (1657) — describing a strongly auditory-oriented people among whom the young rule over the old — clearly reveals an anti-Cartesian attitude associated with the epistemological elevation of sensuality in general, and here specifically of hearing. The monism intended to overcome Descartes’ dualism of body and mind is carried out here from the side of the senses themselves: mind becomes bound once again to sensuality. Bergerac’s inhabitants of the moon possess mechanical audiobooks so small that they can hang them from their ears and continue educating themselves while listening wherever they go.
After generations of Renaissance Vitruvianism, Claude Perrault criticizes the harmonic foundations of ideal proportions in Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes selon la méthode des anciens (1683).
He advances several arguments:
The ancients themselves did not proportion according to unified rules — this is demonstrated through measurements of classical columns regarded as exemplary within rule-based poetics.
The perception of well-formedness depends upon the viewer’s standpoint and upon the architectural surroundings of the columns.
And finally, the analogy between eye and ear is inadmissible because nothing visually comparable exists to the harmonic effect of consonance in acoustics.
Perrault writes:
“From this it follows that what pleases the eye is not grounded in proportion if the eye does not know it, which is usually the case.”⁵
Pleasure in seeing therefore remains restricted to the recognition of something already known. Thus pleasurable perception becomes tied to professional knowledge familiar with the rules — while the layperson is called upon to educate himself. What is established here for architecture also applies to large portions of classical musical composition oriented around particular rules of harmony. On the level of the score — visually and spatially accessible as a flat surface — many compositions appear as refined works of rational combinatorics. Yet the listener, hearing alone and without knowledge of the score, is often unable to perceive these harmonic subtleties.
Acoustic Experiments
Large vaults — whether as domes or wall niches — together with elliptical ground plans or ceiling forms, constitute essential architectural elements of Saint Peter’s and Saint James’ in Rome, for which Kircher develops his proposal:
“To arrange and prepare a choir in a church so artfully that three musicians or singers accomplish as much as otherwise one hundred.”
He imagines the musicians — or an organ — positioned at the center of an acoustic collecting reflector, a vault directed toward a second reflector sufficiently distant to generate echoes, which itself points toward the place “where the people in the church perform their greatest devotion.”
Within such an arrangement, music may be produced
“such that the people located at the said place believe no otherwise than that there are two choirs, and that a great multitude of musicians are singing or playing together.”¹⁰
Only the musical composition capable of exploiting this acoustic arrangement is still missing.
Kircher proposes the decisive compositional device: pauses that render the echo perceptible, their duration adapted to the loudness and persistence of the primary sound.
“Therefore, when the first or principal choir sings the first clausula and afterwards pauses or remains silent, the other circular artificial choir will meanwhile repeat or echo what was sung.”¹¹
Thus a specific acoustic response of space — the echo — is explicitly identified as a compositional actor within music itself. In situations of speech, our primary attention as listeners lies in understanding what is being said.
The intelligibility of spoken language, however, depends not only upon semantics and syntax, but also upon acoustical conditions — particularly room acoustics.
In Essais sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746), Étienne Bonnot de Condillac writes:
“The prosody of the ancients also provides the explanation for a circumstance no one has yet clarified. It concerns discovering why Roman orators, who delivered speeches in the forum, could be heard by the entire people. The sound of our voice easily reaches the farthest corners of a large square; the whole difficulty lies in preventing syllables from becoming confused with one another. Yet this problem diminishes the more clearly the syllables of individual words are distinguished through the prosodic characteristics of a language. In Latin they are distinguished through the quality of sounds, through accent — which independently of meaning required the voice to rise and fall — and through differing quantity. We, by contrast, lack accent, quantity is not differentiated in our language, and many of our syllables are altogether silent. A Roman could therefore be heard in a square where a Frenchman would scarcely be intelligible, or perhaps not intelligible at all.”¹²
Whether all speakers were in fact “heard by the entire people” may be left open; Condillac’s references to the places of assembly “in the forum” also remain vague. Yet the relation he describes between prosody, intelligibility of speech, and sound reflection is remarkable, because it suggests an interaction between language and the architecturally shaped square — one that relates to acoustic perception and both reflects and initiates the formation of groups within social and political processes.
How can how many people be addressed intelligibly at the same time, and in what kind of place?
Beyond the vocal and linguistic aspects, this question points to a place-bound core: the architectural form and materialization of the space of hearing and speaking, which determines the room acoustics of the listening situation.
Spatial Hearing
As a systematic point of reference, Jens Blauert’s psychoacoustic study Spatial Hearing (1974) may be cited here.
The high plasticity of our visual field in the near region of our arms and hands turns, with increasing distance, into a flatter impression; these spatial impressions are made possible essentially by the differing light stimulations of the two eyes. The same applies analogously to the sense of hearing, with the head serving as a separating body between the two ears and thus producing different acoustic stimulations at the left and right ear.
Through the investigation of head-related transfer functions, Blauert developed the physiologically and psychologically grounded theory of the localization of sound sources. It forms the empirical basis for an aesthetic theory of acoustic spatial impression in linguistic, musical, and architectural contexts.
Absolute Space and Space as a Form of Intuition
For his philosophical project of critical idealism, Immanuel Kant adopted Isaac Newton’s conception of absolute space in a particularly significant way.
Absolute space — free of observers and therefore itself unperceived, visible at most to a divine eye — presents nothing other than idealized relations between objects. Newton thus presents absolute space in his Opticks (1704) as the site of mathematical-physical theory formation.
Kant relocates this site of mathematical-physical theory formation into a transcendental subject which, prior to all experience and independently of all experience, first makes possible the unity, reliability, and regularity of the experiential world.
If the transcendental subject materializes in a genius, the famous Kantian formulation results: the human genius — Newton, for example — prescribes laws to nature.
For Kant this means that experienced space is constituted through a universal, purely mental, and therefore theoretical structure whose embodiment is the transcendental subject.
Newton’s absolute space thus becomes a subject-centered and simultaneously universal form of the intuition of space.
Hermann Rudolf Lotze’s interpretation of the transcendental subject as a universal structure of perception leads directly toward the concepts of Neo-Kantianism.
Lotze writes:
“I cite these simple examples once more in order to make clear how there can be a knowledge whose truth is entirely independent of the skeptical question concerning its agreement with a reality of things existing beyond it. Even if the course of the external world had only once presented us fleetingly with the perception of two colors or tones, our thinking would immediately separate them from those moments in time and solidify them and their relations and oppositions as a permanent object of inner intuition, regardless of whether perception ever again offered them to us in repeated actuality.”¹³
This description of an “inner intuition” refers neither to the individual development nor to the species-development of memory, but rather to Plato’s timeless world of ideas and thereby to harmonic thought associated with the Timaeus.
The chapter in which Lotze develops his conception of inner intuition — characterized by enduring certainty — bears the title World of Ideas; the references to Plato are numerous and explicit.
The motif of certainty — emphatically truth, objectivity, and the absolute validity of universal judgments — forms another background for the presentation of the concept of space in Newton, Kant, Lotze, and later Schmitz and Böhme.
Without body, without sensuous perception, a harmonic-idealistic-transcendental terminology can indeed be constructed that claims to identify universal structures of perception.
Yet nothing is thereby achieved for the investigation of actual spatial perception.
If one compares this kind of theory formation with the achievements of the previously discussed authors — Bacon, Condillac, Diderot, Herder, Blauert — an opposition becomes apparent between, on the one hand, the traditions of logos and their secular rationalist successors, particularly within German Idealism, and on the other hand sensualist-materialist forms of theory.
A philosophically coherent connection between these Neo-Kantian notions of universal perceptual structure and the evolutionary formation of perceiving bodies proves impossible.
Instead, Neo-Kantianism reveals an affinity toward concepts of innate ideas.
Space and Movement
For conceptions of the analogical interplay between eye and ear, it is remarkable that Heinrich von Helmholtz addresses spatial vision in optics — developing stereometry and stereoscopy — yet finds no analogous theme of spatial hearing in acoustics.
In his writings on aesthetics, Helmholtz adopts the distinction established by Lessing between the visual arts as arts of space and literature and music as arts of time.
He interprets this distinction as one between arts of the eye and arts of the ear, thereby creating a new division among the arts.
Painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature aim at representations as mental acts — the cognizing eye.
Opposed to them stands music, whose appearance exists directly within hearing itself — the sensing ear.
Helmholtz writes:
“In this sense it is clear that music possesses a more immediate connection with sensual sensation than any of the other arts; and from this it follows that the doctrine of auditory sensations is called upon to play a far more essential role in musical aesthetics than, for example, the doctrine of illumination or perspective does in painting.”¹⁴
With this formulation, the event of music is relocated into the interiority of the listener, into a self-referential immediacy of tonal sensations.
Helmholtz can therefore develop the concept of musical movement exclusively within tonal space itself — within scales, intervals, harmonic and melodic relations and progressions.
He writes:
“Every melodic phrase, every chord executed at some pitch may likewise be executed at any other diatonic level in such a way that we immediately and directly perceive the characteristic signs of their similarity. […] Thereby, in essential respects, such great similarity is given between the tonal system and space that the change of pitch — which we often figuratively describe as movement upward or downward — acquires an easily recognizable and striking similarity to movement in space. Thus it further becomes possible for musical movement to imitate the characteristic properties of movement in space caused by motivating forces, and thereby also to provide an image of the impulses and forces underlying movement. Upon this, as it seems to me, rests essentially its capacity to express emotional states.”¹⁵
As impressive as the analogy between musical movement and physical and psychological movement may be, in Helmholtz’s concept of musical expression through movement, no role is played by the passing of musical phrases through the spatially separated registers of the orchestra, nor by the placement of musicians and their movements in relation to physical space.
Neither the room response as a structure of reflection and reverberation, nor binaural perception of localizable sound sources and enveloping spatial impressions, play a role.
In his view, music stands in strong analogy to color and space. Yet he constructs this analogy on the basis of proportionally ordered elements of sound and light — vibrations of specific frequencies — and thereby connects once again to harmonic thought.
With his experimental model of the physiology of the ear, and the corresponding analytical technique of understanding sound composition as a system of resonators later named after him, Helmholtz defined the concept of tone color.
For the dimension of acoustically spatial expression through movement, however, his Neo-Kantian reflections remain metaphorical.
August Schmarsow established that physical movement is a prerequisite for the visual perception of spatial depth, thereby introducing the perceiving body into the discussion of architectural space.
Yet his definition of architecture as a space-shaping art remains bound to Lessing’s rationalist aesthetics; consequently, acoustics — or music as an art of time — does not fall within the domain of architecture’s spatial design.
Body, Architecture, and Atmosphere
With Hermann Schmitz’s concept of the body, or Leib, and Gernot Böhme’s concept of atmosphere, two concepts of a universal structure of perception are present, both of which recall Kant’s transcendental subject and its Neo-Kantian interpretation.
That which lies prior to all experience and, independently of all experience, first makes every experience possible — this is, in Schmitz, the domain of one’s own bodily being, and in Böhme, the atmosphere that precedes every signification.
The particularities of the sensual capacities of perceiving bodies in specifically stimulating environments play only a subordinate role within these conceptual worlds of bodily extensions or atmospheres.
This becomes clear when Böhme divides the relations between music and architecture into three aspects:
“The trivial relation,”
“The middle: space,”
and “atmosphere.”
For him, the fact that every architecture, through form and materialization, conditions the acoustics of spaces — room acoustics — is trivial.
He does not address spatial hearing at all, nor the fact that musical composition and room acoustics may be coordinated with one another.
Against the background of what is now roughly a hundred-year history of psychoacoustics, room acoustics, and electroacoustics — whose research into the relation between music and space cannot be considered complete — this classification as trivial is irritating.
In “The Middle: Space,” Böhme refers to Carl Dahlhaus, who in turn refers to Lessing’s conception of music as an art of time and to the related discussions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Both authors overlook or underestimate the intensive treatment of the theme of music and space that had been underway at least since the Baroque period, as seen in Athanasius Kircher.
Under “atmosphere,” finally, Böhme adopts Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological procedure of epoché.
The universal structure of perception is represented in each individual by virtue of its universality. It is therefore accessible within one’s own experience through, as it were, a second look at one’s own experience.
As an example, Böhme chooses headphone reproduction of music:
“The listener himself, however, hears the tones outside [outside the head; J.S.]; he feels himself within a space filled with tones. It is very important that hearing as such is no different from hearing without headphones, except that through this experimental arrangement it is demonstrated that auditory space is a space of bodily presence, independent of the existence of concrete things.”²⁰
Here one must object: hearing with headphones is different from hearing without them, because the head-related transmissions of sound components that ordinarily — and especially also in the reproduction of stereophonic recordings through loudspeakers — reach both ears are interrupted.
This is what conditions the localization of music inside the head, which is described in the corresponding psychoacoustic literature and which Böhme takes to be a description by people who understand this hearing, in a physicalist — more precisely neurophysiological — manner, as music in the head.²¹
From this single and artificial self-experience, Böhme then derives, through phenomenological reduction, the general assertion that “auditory space is a space of bodily presence.”
The addition that this “auditory space” is independent of the existence of concrete things reveals that, in bodily presence, the issue is not sound waves, reflections, ears, auditory stimuli, auditory sensations, and so forth, but only a general disposition toward the perception of space.
How foundations for the design of architecture are to be gained from this concept of space and auditory space appears, against this background, incomprehensible.
With a definitional statement such as the one cited — “Auditory space is a space of bodily presence” — Böhme directly continues the terminological construction of Leib.
Its primary characteristic, however, remains negatively defined: Leib is not body, not sensuous organism.
Whoever now attempts to fill this definitional gap will indeed be engaging in terminological activity, perhaps also contributing to the popularity of a certain mode of language, but will scarcely be able to contribute meaningfully to the empirical investigation of acoustic spatial perception.
This is not to exclude heuristic functions for Böhme’s concept of atmosphere.
Yet the history of science, especially the history of “top-down conceptual constructions,” counsels skepticism and instead suggests, particularly in aesthetic questions, an inductive approach.
Architecture and Acoustic Design
Under the heading of acoustic design appears a historical and systematic field of research and architectural conception whose development will depend upon an interaction between the natural sciences and the humanities. For the aesthetic question — which concerns both the conditions of production and reception of speech and music and also points toward anthropological themes within philosophy of language — includes not only physiology and psychology, but also physics and its application as technical acoustics within architecture, which daily co-determines the extent and quality of what is sensually accessible.
In the account of the German-Greek cultural philosopher Panajotis Kondylis, the elevation of the sensual over everything purely intellectual, over every logos, appears as a defining sign of the European Enlightenment. This takes place within modern rationalism, yet cannot simply be identified with it: speech precedes grammar, music precedes theories of harmony, and building precedes theories of proportion.
In this recognition of everyday activity prior to all science, art, and doctrine, there also appears the experimental, inductive, experience-oriented project character of an enlightened modernity. Acoustic design connects itself to this and thereby continues a methodology already anticipated by Epicurus, Lucretius, and later Vitruvius:
To understand speaking and building as an uninterrupted and fundamentally open process in the course of which human beings create, within nature, a second nature that we are accustomed to calling culture.
Jürgen Strauss completed training as a physics laboratory technician at Landis & Gyr in Zug in 1985. Within electroacoustics he specialized in the development of sound reinforcement systems for studios, concert halls, churches, museums, and cinemas. Through the integration of electroacoustics and room acoustics, his field of activity expanded into architecture and sound engineering. Alongside his interest in systematic acoustics, he also engages with questions concerning the history of science, technology, and art. Strauss is the founder and owner of STRAUSS ELEKTROAKUSTIK GmbH.
Literature
Alberti, Leon Battista (2005): Ten Books on Architecture [1485]. Darmstadt.
Böhme, Gernot (2006): Architecture and Atmosphere. Munich.
Blauert, Jens (1974): Spatial Hearing. Stuttgart.
Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de (2006): Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge [1746]. Würzburg.
Dahlhaus, Carl (1986): Music in History and the Present. MGG1 (1949–86). Place?
Diderot, Denis (1961): Philosophical Writings [1749]. Berlin.
Helmholtz, Heinrich von (1896): On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music [1862]. Braunschweig.
Herder, Johann Gottfried (1993): Herder Works [1769]. Frankfurt am Main.
Husserl, Edmund (2012): The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Hamburg.
Kircher, Athanasius (1983): New Art of Echo and Sound [1684]. Salzgitter-Ringelheim.
Kondylis, Panajotis (1981): The Enlightenment within the Framework of Modern Rationalism. Stuttgart.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1990): Laocoön. Frankfurt am Main.
Lotze, Rudolf Hermann (1989): Logic. Third Book: On Knowledge [1843]. Hamburg.
Lucretius (1991): On the Nature of Things [ca. 50 BCE]. Munich.
Perrault, Claude (2002): Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients [1683]. In: Fritz Neumeyer, ed., Source Texts on Architectural Theory. Munich et al.
Schmarsow, August (1903): Our Relation to the Visual Arts. Stuttgart.
