Sound is complex, complicated, and convoluted. (And those are just the “C’s”). It’s pressure waves that travel through the air as vibrations, when they reach your ear it causes your ear drum to move, ‘knocking’ a small chain of bones together in order to make liquid in your inner ear (cochlea) move up and down. Your brain takes this tiny bit of moving liquid and interprets it as sound. THAT IS INSANE. No really, just think about how completely insane that is. When I first starting my interest in acoustics I constantly looking for little short cuts or rules about sound that are always a constant. But sound isn’t so simple. It is because the concept of sound is so extraordinary, that I am still interested in it.
In the beginning of Golan Levin’s lecture, he said that he hasn’t worked in the aural realm in over 9 years. Which is extremely surprising after hearing him speak. That class was an hour and a half of fast-paced exciting theory, experiments, toys, scientific research, and sound concepts. We jumped from youtube video to youtube video. There was barely enough time for questions in between his excitement to share other installations and experiments. and the best part, 80% of what he showed us I have seen before. But instead of getting bored or tired, my passion for sound grew as i remembered all of the different ways you could express sound.
Like I said in the beginning, sound is a complicated thing. And I think it takes a repetition of explaining from multiple points of view before you are truly able to grasp everything that sound is. As an architect I come from a different background and viewpoint than most people in the field. I can’t read music or think of sound in terms of tempo and pitch, I’m not an engineer who can calculate decibels or reverberation time, I am not a coder/Computer scientist who thinks in terms of scripts and numbers or a sound designer who programs with speakers, mixers, wires and hardware. But I have taken classes in each of these departments, and its only when the same idea begins to overlap that I truly understand how complex sound goes. Golan spoke to me from the point of view of an artist and a designer, and re-watching and re-thinking about old concepts brought me a greater understanding of sound.