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What is music? Music has to do with an enormous discipline. To play an instrument, to read music, to perform music, requires a discipline. This is one of the connecting links between music and architecture, because both are extremely rigorous engagements. You cannot play music approximately, unless you're just playing around; if you really want to play a melody, you have to hit every note correctly, and every tempo and every harmony has to be there in order to be audible.
What is music? Music has to do with an enormous discipline. To play an instrument, to read music, to perform music, requires a discipline. This is one of the connecting links between music and architecture, because both are extremely rigorous engagements. You cannot play music approximately, unless you're just playing around; if you really want to play a melody, you have to hit every note correctly, and every tempo and every harmony has to be there in order to be audible.
And I think that is true of architecture: you cannot really do architecture approximately, you have to do it exactly. And what ties them together in my own experience is the element of time and the element of mathematics. Both of them really are very exact disciplines, they are very precise, they are both drawn in a certain way, and the drawings, whether they are scores in music or architectural drawings, connect the music.
I've always thought that it would be very difficult to do in architecture what some contemporary composers have suggested in music, to have rotating players, to have players interpret, and yet I think what architecture can do is involve the audience in it.
The audience has somehow to complete the building. Even though architecture is very precise, because you can't have people decide how much steel you need to support a roof, I believe a building's spatiality, its materiality, has to be open so the public can form its own architectural operation on the building. I have always thought that my buildings would be nothing if they were not for people to construct their meanings.
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I would like to Challenge Mr. Libeskind's proposal for the aim of proposing a new approach to architecture. I call it Environmental Expressionism. While the realms of music and architecture do intersect and their points of connection have been articulated by countless philosophers and aestheticians, there is a crucial defecit that is apparent now when before it was not. In so far as musical 'composition' is concerned, the intersections between architecture and music are firm and well established as is evident in Mr. Libeskind's article. However, there is a crucial element that is lacking which is intrinsically tp the issue of interactivity that Mr. Libeskind alludes to by no uncertain means, yet ultimately fsails to reconcile. It is of course the gesture. The expressive kinetic element that takes music off of the page as a static formulaic product and infuses it with life, and a touch of the sublime and the transcendent which is the raison d'etre bestowed upon music since the beginning. For nearly the entire history of architecture's existence, the gesture, the artistic expressive qualities inherent to the form had to out of necessity be given a cursory nod at best since it is a discipline concerned first and foremost with hard science. What I am proposing is not a new idea entirely. Certainly the expressive quality to which I refer can be found in the Catherdrals of Europe, and the temples and Ashrams of India, Shrines and dwelling spaces of Japan etc. There have been musicians such as Iannis Xenakis who successfully executed a system of architectural design that is as true to his music as one can ever hope to come, and that has a kinetic element as well. Even the Mayans constructed architctural spaces designed to transmogrify and transform sounds in ingenious ways. The architecture of Gaudi and Ghery posseses spontaneaous and expressive qualities that can be appreciated universally, and the structures of Vito Acconci have brought the absurd, and the cursorily ludicrous musings of the poet to literal and figurative concrete form. But not yet has there been a truly meaningful merger of these arenas of creation. The limits have been mainly technological, and the technology now exists to eradicate the borders that have kept the now synthesizing new phase restricted. It is the unified gesture of the designer, the artist, and the inhabitant that must be coalesced to create what I propose.
I would like to start first, with a defense of ignorance. Ignorance in the service of the uncanny. The idiot savants, child prodigies who possess a supernatural mastery over media and systems that remind us all of the innate divinity of the design of the human mind and it's machinations. It is ignorance of restrictions, and criteria such as taste and academic formulas that, pretentious exaltations and the other social binds that restrict pure creativity and ego-less passion. Thanks now to digital sound manipulation technology, a person totally ignorant of musical notation and instrumental familiarity can create music every bit as powerful as the greatest musicians of the past should they have adequate passion, and faith in their intuition. It is music that is capable of expanding new space as it creates it due to the benefit of linear editing where the process of recording, composition, presentation have been united. I myself have recently written a score for string quartet as well as several piano suites, without ever cracking a composition book. It took pure intuition and drive alone to complete a task that in the past would have taken years to execute. That is the power of digital music, direct and absolute control to create.
Music has been very much ennobled by a recognition and embrace of ignorance to it's supposed 'rules' which has led to the impotence of so called contemporary classical music and the ascension of Jazz, Rock n' Roll, and other forms of 'popular' music. But even in the realms of avant garde 'serious' music Ed Lomburg Holme, the ICP orchestra, and noise artists such as Merzbow, an embrace of ignornance and an absolute embrace of intuition and gesture had completely changed contemporary music in a way that makes conventional ties between Architecture and music anachronistic at best.
Mr. Libeskind may be an architect and a musician, but I am an artist, a poet and a painter. Two disciplines which one may argue do not require ‘discipline’ so to speak and the rigor that accompanies it. To be an artist, one most first and foremost be intuitive, because we must remember that the role of the artist is first and foremost to act as a bridge between the divine, innate, and intuitive and the banal and the ‘normal’. I justify my statement and defense of ignorance thusly based on a hypothetical argument that has been used when discussing artificial intelligence. Let’s say that we have two people. One is color blind, the other is not. They both wish to become artists, painters specifically. The one who is color blind has spent countless years learning about color theory and has devised a system where by they can successfully identify colors based on other systems that have been devised that through trial and error have become 100% fool proof. They study proportions as well and slave away testing their products on people, gauging their responses. At the end of their toils they have produced a system that is perfectly capable of allowing them to make beautiful paintings as if they had the ability to see the entire time. What about our ignorant artist who sees color? What does he or she produce? Because they have an intimate and direct relationship with the world of colors inherently they can with the same amount of study of composition etc. reach the end result and also infuse their product with something that the color blind artist could not. Instinct, intuition, and direct relatability. Now, let’s say that the unthinkable happens, and this ignorant dumb brute should get his hands on the scientific system of the color blind artist who has used it to create a product that the seeing artist can manifest inherently? The intuitive artist who can then familiarize himself with the system can experiment with it, and play with it being able to see directly how the input and output are related, expediting the process of discovery. He can usurp the system devised by the color blind artist, and use it in ways the other would never have imagined because the seeing artist still has the benefit of perceiving color which has shaped his psyche his entire life and made him an inherently better artist still. Now, one can say ‘how unfair!’ the ignorant should benefit from the hard work of the poor blighted blind artist! Does the blind artist have no instincts? No ability to be swayed by beauty! The answer is no ofcourse. What we have here is a dichotomous relationship between designer, and user. The designer creates what the user could not, and the user creates what the designer can not. Such as one is ruled by the supremacy of one hemisphere of the brain over the other, the two hemispheres are not independent of each other. They are not at war to see who is better, but rather are enmeshed in collaboration. One defines the other, and they both define the divine brain and psyche as a whole. The total perceptive faculty is bereft without each hemisphere fulfilling their role in the creation and promulgation of new and ecstatic sensation.
Now, let’s reapply this same logic to the worlds of musical composition and architecture. Two disciplines which are so abstract, more so than painting and poetry, that it is absolutely necessary to posses a mind that is more attuned to the rational and fastidious than to the romantic and intuitive. It has come about in recent years that tools have been developed that allow the ignorant to get the ‘product’ of these labors with out the years of training et al that can become so tyrannical on the mind that they restrict the ability of the artist in question to merge with the totality and innate stupid wisdom of their instincts and intuitions. Musical compositional tools have been developed as well as architectural generating tools that make the work flow simpler and more direct, more open to intuition that has made these disciplines more innately subject to expression than ever before. There has been a merger of the two hemispheres in the realm of architecture and musical composition. The user doesn’t have to understand how the system works, only how to use it. they play, experiment, learn and take notes, feel intuitively and elaborate on their discoveries. With these discoveries are then passed back to the designer, the possibility is now at hand to create mutually inclusive expressions of architecture and music that are derived from the same common system. A music that is solely dependent on the organization of an architectural design, and an architectural model that is designed to morph and transmogrify as sound is being generated. Of course, one needs an activational element. THE BODY! The most ignorant of them all! The inhabitant! The one who is ignorant of both design and creation! The one for whom all of this has been created. They move with awe through the space that has been the product of the labor of these two poles! Perception is enhanced, ecstacy is communicated, and creation is validated.
People are attracted to what they can feel intuitively, when the artist is able to transcend their media and make it sing, to free it from discipline and rigor, to able to cut off everything that came before that particular work and prove their merit as an artist in one fell swoop, with a single expressive gesture.
That which molds sound is architectural in nature. The sound is nothing without activation. The simple motion of the body through space is the temporal element. Nothing in this equation is figurative. It is as illustrative of what is proposed as it is feasible to execute.
What then are the tools used to execute such a feat?
Max/MSP, Processing, Maya, Blender, Modalys, Ableton Live, Reason
Create the musical system in Max/MSP, create it’s concrete equivalent in Processing, articulate the rough edges in Maya, remodel it in Modalys to analyze how the sound will behave, use Reason and Live to create the sounds themselves. Using sensors in a sensorium, as the body moving through space affects different qualities of the sound, the architectural space itself moves.
Wait! What then is the difference between architecture and sculpture! What if you create an architecture that inhabits the body of the inhabitant! That’s where Virtual reality comes in. But for now I'm sleepy. That's a topic that can wait until morning.
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